2 lan ports?

[neotigZ]

Hi.. I have a ecs pa1 mvp mobo and it has 2 lan ports one is 100mbps and the other is 1gbps. whats the purpose of having 2 of them? and what would happen if i hooked them both up?

[brian_holiday]

Lots of reasons for having two. Redundancy (one of mine just died), Routing, security (Firewall the outbound connection to the Internet and still be able to get to your local LAN freely).

I hadn't thought about it before, but perhaps aggregation. I wonder of you could put both on the same LAN and load balance the connections. Anyone know of anything like that?

[neotigZ]

when i hook up the 1gbps it changes to 100mbps. whats up with that? i don't know what aggregation is. im not stupid just ya know never heard of it. lol im not seeing a difference in anything with them both hooked up.

[Wyndle]

If the device your 1gbps NIC connects to is 100mbps the NIC will auto-negotiate down to 100mbps. You would need a Gigabit Router or Switch and another 1gbps device on the same Router or Switch to see any benifit above 100mbps.

Aggregation is where a single computer uses multiple network connections equally which effectively multiplies your total connection speed, though it isn't as easy as 2 ports equals double speed.

[brian_holiday]

Off topic. Wyndle, I sent you a PM.