Question Regarding Dual Ethernet on ASRock Motherboards.

[Rhaegyn]

.Hello LTT Community,

I recently purchased a ASRock Fatal1ty X99M Killer/3.1 Micro ATX LGA2011-3 Motherboard and I wanted to ask the knowledgeable community here what the dual (x2) Ethernet ports were used, or what they could be used for on this motherboard? I read a few reference articles on using both of the same time as a weird feature, but I'm still unsure how to take advantage of both ethernet ports simultaneously.

Moreover, as you can see this board comes with a killer network card. Can anyone that has experience with, or is an expert themselves, give me a description of the performance feature improvements this card has over other standard ones?

 

[kanewolf]

Dual NIC ports in a home environment don't make much sense to me. You could get a managed gigabit etherent switch and use link aggregation to increase the available bandwidth from the switch to 2Gbs. BUT unless you have a NAS unit with link aggregation OR have dozens of clients using that host as a server, there is no benefit.

 

[Rhaegyn]

Ah, I see. So basically I should just use the killer NIC port, as it is a more high performance NIC?

 

[kanewolf]

Ah, I see. So basically I should just use the killer NIC port, as it is a more high performance NIC?

If you game, it is suppose to improve ping times. I have never used a "killer" NIC. There are some posts on this board of people having problems with the killer NICs ...