With mostly every motherboard nowadays you get 2 LAN ports on board.
 
My question is... Is there a way to actually get ping improvements by setting one of the ports for outgoing and the other port for incoming packets? It sounds like it would slightly relieve some stress from the CPU and perhaps increase ping and maybe see tiny fps gains?
 
So would there be a way to configure these 2 ports for this? or are the 2 ports just to connect to a LAN and the internet at the same time?

i don't know much about it, but the fact of running two chips at once instead of a single one would probably be more stressing on the cpu/chipset. in terms of performance increase, if anything, it probably won't make a big difference.  
 
maybe a difference in ping.
 
i don't know if there's a way to do it. that'd be interesting. i'm sure there is for server filters and such, though.

For that to happen both you have to be set to the same IP which would obviously cause a IP conflict on the network. The NVIDIA 680i boards support teaming whereby the 2 work together to increase bandwidth ie. a 100mbps connection is now a 200mbps connection. I dont think this "teaming" supports one out and the other in though.
 
I believe there is a main reason this is done... so we can have multiple access (ie one to modem other to network). No other "home user" i believe would need this functionality

Nice, Thanks for your answers. I think it would be kinda useful to be able to set this up. I have a Maximus Formula SE btw. Maybe in the future they'll plan something

considering most mobos come with gig ethernet now anyway, you would not see any difference in performance. it would also cause headaches with mac address tables and confuse matters.

I second M1ddy's post:  Most boards have Gigabit ethernet.  And even when that's not the case, the bottleneck is going to be your ISP anyhow.