Multiple Gigabit ports on motherboards

No. Gigabit Ethernet = 1000Mbps transfer rate. Your cable service is probably 10Mbps... this would be the max transfer rate for the total number of computer connected to the single computer line. If that's too much for you, I'll explain it this way: Imagine your Gigabit Ethernet ports as a 10 lane super-highway, and imagine your cable line a two way street. Even if you added another 10 lanes to your super-highway (an extra Gig Ethernet port), you will have to go through that two way street (cable connection). Your cable connection speed is the bottleneck here. Hopefully this clears things up.  

The only advantage to dual ports is to allow your computer to act as a gateway, attach to a LAN, or have an extra Ethernet cable for failover.

I have tried in for hours to utilize BOTH ethernet ports on my Asus Maximus motherboard - without success

my set up:

I use one port for my router = which works fine - for the internet and my LAN


BUT

I connected a brand new 5 port switch - into the other ethernet port (on the MB)
and then I plugged my LAN = 3 ethernet cables (CAT 5) - into it
my LAN does not work! -

I don't know why - can anyone shed some light on this for me -?

Incidentally the reason I want to do this is - to maximize my internet speed and keep my WAN away from my LAN

your help and expertise would be greatly appreciated

You can't use a switch as a router, you need to have a router to act as a host to pass out addresses, without it it's useless. A switch only relays the dhcp servers connection and address passes. For instance, lets say you have a router with 4 ports, thats enough for 4 computers, but lets say you have 7 friends over, what do you do. Unplug port 4 and run it to a switch with 5 ports. So you run a cable between port 4 on the router to port 5 on the switch, now you have 7 ports. It piggybacks the connection.

Thank you for your reply - Much appreciated


Sadly I con't think I have made myself very clear:

to explain


there are 2 ethernet ports on my MotherBoard


MB ethernet port 1 = has a router connected to it in turn the router has to 2 other pc's - connected to it - this port accesses the net


(This is my dilemma and question)


MB ethernet port 2 - I want to connect 3 xbox's (which I use as media servers) on an internal LAN (not connected to the net)


How do I achieve this


Any and all help, advice is greatly appreciated


I wait for your considered opinion

I'll assume there is no DHCP server on your second network, so, what you'll need to do is manually address your Windows machine on a different sub-net than your Internet network.

So, if your first network is using the standard 192.168.1.x network, you can address your second network with 192.168.2.x/24. Leave the gateway address blank.

ex:

Windows second port:
IP: 192.168.2.1
Subnet: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: blank

XBox #1: (I'm ASSuming they can be manually addressed)
IP: 192.168.2.2
Subnet: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: blank

Your Windows machine and Xbox's should now be able to talk..

BUT...  


how (or what) do I attach to the second ethernet port - for example ..

do I attach a cat 5 cable -----> to a hub------> then cat 5 to each of the xbox's


I am not being deliberately obtuse - and I DO appreciate everyone's help, but I am not getting

the FULL answer


thanks as always to all of you who have taken their time and given their knowledge