Question 2 nics 1 router

Brian Drew

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Mar 24, 2013
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i would like to have a dedicated lan connection and a dedicated internet connection. where any device on the lan can only connect via the 2nd nic.

the main purpose for this is while i am gaming, bandwidth seems to struggle sometimes while other in my home are streaming from my pc.

i guess in essence i would like nic1 to only have internet access and no lan access while nic2 has lan access but no internet access.

for reference, 3 or more devices access the router via wifi, 1 device is ethernet that is not my pc.
 
Unless you wat to make your PC also a wireless router for other in the house (and incur additional performance hit), you can't control WiFi from other devices to the router.

And the simple reason for that is these other devices go thru the router in order to access content on your PC, so second NIC won't help. May be getting a dedicated NAS device for others is better idea...
 
content being streamed is on my pc.
my pc has the 2 wired nics.

2 smart tvs and an xbox 360 connect to the network via wifi and access my pc for streaming through plex.

the main goal i guess i could say is to have 1 nic dedicated to streaming and the 2nd nic for normal internet stuff.
 
oh, currently i have my on-board nic (intel I219-v) set to 192.168.1.13 and the second (pci-e intel EXPI9301CT) set to 192.168.1.113

i thought maybe i could just use port forwarding but plex keeps setting itself to x.x.x.13:32400 when i want it on x.x.x.113
that is an issue with plex itself that i am also researching a workaround.
 
and also, i bought the second nic because i thought my on-board was going bad. speed tests spike up to 700-800 mbps and then taper down to 500 or sometimes lowers than 300. isp tech has already been out and the lines and modem and router are all fine. modem tested at a strong 910 and the router tested at a strong 920 using his machine. speed tests over wifi, both 2.4 and 5 ghz test steady with no drop off.

new nic suffers the same spike and then drop off, so i dont know what could be going on with that.

so i am trying to find a way to use the second nic for a purpose i thought i would benefit from.
 
You likely have some other problem that is not network.

Lets say you have 3 machines streaming data and they use some crazy high number like 100mbps each....it much much less.. so now you are using 300mbps. This leaves about 600mbps of bandwidth left for your PC to run games. Online games need only about 1mbps....so now you are using 301mbps out of your total.

Now I am not even considering your internet connection I am only looking at the port on your machine. The machines doing the steaming do not use any of your internet bandwidth, the traffic passes through the router lan ports and does not go to the wan.

You need to look at the utilization in the resource monitor to see your actual usage.

I suspect if you are getting issues in the game it is the extra load from running the streaming service. Many times the disk systems will bottleneck before network does. Why you get strange speedtest results is hard to say it will not affect your game since it needs almost no bandwidth. It is most likely some issue with the ISP network but you would have to do lots of testing to be sure. It could be your router and what feature you use. Some routers have issues keeping up with really fast internet connection. In the long run it likely doesn't matter since you can not likely use the bandwidth you have anyway.
 
oh, currently i have my on-board nic (intel I219-v) set to 192.168.1.13 and the second (pci-e intel EXPI9301CT) set to 192.168.1.113

i thought maybe i could just use port forwarding but plex keeps setting itself to x.x.x.13:32400 when i want it on x.x.x.113
that is an issue with plex itself that i am also researching a workaround.
Two network connections with the same subnet creates loops. That kills performance. Disconnect one.