Multiple NICs for increased bandwidth?

May 14, 2008 2:56:37 PM

Be easy on me. I know nothing about this stuff.

Since my MB has two network controllers, can I use both at the same time to increase my download bandwidth?

I have comcast high speed and a netgear Netgear WGT624 wireless router. My MB is and Asus Rampage Formula with two Marvell Yukon 88E8056 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet controllers. I got the idea last night and thought maybe I could just plug two wires into the computer. Obviously this didn't do much.

I do have two ip addresses, one on each card. Can I set priority on each card? Maybe like a dual core processor, can I run one instance of IE on one card and another on the other card?

Does this have nothing to do with the limit of how much I can dowload at once? Does it have to do with my router and Modem?

Thanks,
Ricky

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Bardic

May 15, 2008 10:56:37 PM

You are really limited by your cable connection. Even if your computer and router can handle 100Mbit or 1000 Mbit, your internet speed is only 3 to 15 Mbit/sec.

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sturm

May 16, 2008 4:36:23 PM

Most cable internet connections run at 10Mbit anyways between the modem and the computer. So no you won't see any difference.
Remember the download speed is dependent on the server speed connection and not necessarily your maximum download speed. In other words a 1mbit connection can download just as fast from the same server as a 10mbit connection if the server only connects at say .5 mbit/sec. Just an example.

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nowwhatnapster

May 17, 2008 8:57:15 PM

unless your living in the NYC area your internet connection wont be fast enough to inhibit a gigabit ethernet connection.

If your PC only had a 100mbit connection, yes teaming two 100mbit connections on your mobo would likely improve your speed, however you need a router that can support teaming ports and also operated at gigabit speeds to your modem for this situation to work.

Once you get to gigabit speed, generally speaking, there will be other factors that influence how fast you can download.

Tweaking your router will likely prove better performance when trying to download from many different places (ie. using bittorrent or p2p software where many connections are established to download data) Router becomes the bottleneck.

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rickpatbrown

May 18, 2008 3:36:17 AM

My thinking was that if I have two computers in my house, they could both download at the same speed -let's say each can download about 1000Kb/s max. If I had two doing this, that would be 2000Kb/s.

I was hoping that by using both NICs and having two IP addresses, the server would think that there are two computers there and would allow for the double bandwidth.

Those are pretty accurate numbers (I think) for my question in particular. From my limited knowledge, I don't think that my router, NIC or ISP is causing the downloads to max out at those numbers. I was assuming that it is the server that I am connected to.

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