Dual Gigabit Lan

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P

Can someone explain to me the advantage and/or necessity of a dual gigabit
lan connection on the new Asus p5AD2 board? Thanks!
 
"P" said:
Can someone explain to me the advantage and/or necessity of a dual gigabit
lan connection on the new Asus p5AD2 board? Thanks!
Click to expand...

You get two, in case one burns out :-) Seriously, the onboard
peripherals on these boards are way overkill, and suggest the
sticker price will be high. (I.e. Peripherals are sprinkled on
boards, to justify the high asking price, and not the other
way around.)

With the amount of power that will be dissipated in the computer
case, maybe you'll be placing your disk drives in a separate
enclosure and Ethernet connecting the enclosure to your computer.
That might be one use for it.

Paul
 
P said:
Can someone explain to me the advantage and/or necessity of a dual gigabit
lan connection on the new Asus p5AD2 board? Thanks!
Click to expand...

I think you have to qualify the question with a specific scenario first.

However, for a brief answer, I doubt if the vast majority of people
would ever use both LAN ports and especially at gigabit speeds.

But...... it could allow you to say connect two fast home PCs directly
together with a crossover cable for a gigabit link, then the second
port of one machine could go to your internet DSL modem and/or your
normal 10/100 network. Saves a gigabit switch. I'd have certainly used
this scenario myself at home if our two main machines had dual gigabit
ports.

Or ..... for a server in a larger environment - in my work for example,
it would be very useful to have a gigabit link from a P5AD2 serving a
localised gigabit LAN with a large amount of multimedia based content
flying around, but as this LAN itself connects into a larger network and
a very fast pipe to a WAN, a separate gigabit link into this would help
the data flow. You can usually achieve the same with switches and
routers, but a good quality Cisco setup is going to run into thousands
and as building a dual channel onto a motherboard is going to cost
practically nothing extra...... why not ??? .... for a server anyway.


--
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P said:
Can someone explain to me the advantage and/or necessity of a dual gigabit
lan connection on the new Asus p5AD2 board? Thanks!
Click to expand...

I dont think there is a necessity.

They start using a gigalan controller in the unit, it becomes a standard
feature, a new chipset comes out and little to no modifications is needed
other than changing the chip to now have that 10/100 turn into a intel
gigaport..

You also have users who feel that the onboard controller is going to suck
more resources than the seperated one.

At the end of the day there's no harm to you and it might work to your
advantage some day too (never know)..
I have had 4 in my box before (2 onboard and 2 installed) but dont need em
anymore ;)
 
In case you need to connect to two distinct networks with different ip
addresses with different high workloads. In this configuration, switches
would be a risk if you really want to keep those networks separate and
working at high performance.

--
Pole Dome Guitar Religion

"If you choose not to decide
you still have made a choice..."
Rush
 
I think the question is more: Why have 2 NIC's? Who cares what speed they
are when they are considerably better interfaces than the older 10/100's.
The GB Lan's auto sense speed and polarity and have cable testing / checking
diagnostic abilities built in, so I would prefer 2 x GB to 2 x 10/100. Also,
If you build a building today, what do you wire it for? Telephone? Fax? 10Mb
LAN? 100Mb LAN? CAT 1, CAT 2, CAT5? Nope, none of those. CAT6 everywhere. So
if you get new kit, what should it be? Gigabit everywhere 'cos if 100mbit
aint obsolete yet, it will be very very soon.

Why 2? Ahh DMZ, Multiple networks & Routing...

Lastly I hear people say things like "But you can't get 125 MBytes / Second
through a GB LAN at the moment if you try!" Who cares. If you run backups
across a 100mbit LAN, your will be lucky to get 8 MBytes / second. With GB
Lan, you might with older hardware get 12 MBytes / second & reduce by 50%
your backup times (which is important if you pay someone overtime to sit
there and watch it finish) I did & I get more sleep every night because of
it.

- Tim
 
P said:
Can someone explain to me the advantage and/or necessity of a dual gigabit
lan connection on the new Asus p5AD2 board? Thanks!
Click to expand...

This mobo has great potential as a low end server mobo like for MS SBS2003.
On server configurations one almost always wants one NIC for the local LAN
and another for the WAN(Internet). So the two NIC requirement is clear.
The WAN NIC could easlily be 100BT but then why use two different NIC chips
requiring two different sets of device drivers ergo two 1000BT NICs onboard
and also Wi-Fi as one almost always wants that on a server these days too.
Asus did it right and the additions didn't cost much.

Note however that this mobo may get recalled as it includes the ICH6R for
which Intel has just announced a recall.
 
Ron Reaugh said:
Note however that this mobo may get recalled as it includes the ICH6R for
which Intel has just announced a recall.
Click to expand...


Is it actually out yet? All the Asus website has is the specs and a picture.

Nick
 
P said:
Can someone explain to me the advantage and/or necessity of a dual gigabit
lan connection on the new Asus p5AD2 board? Thanks!
Click to expand...

Multi-homed workstations/servers (i.e. computers belonging to more than
one network, more or less what Gareth Jones posted).

Regards
Nikos
 
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