Thread: Multiple Gigabit ports on motherboards

I have an EVGA motherboard with 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports. What is the advantage of having 2 ports instead of one? Can I plug 2 Ethernet cables into it and run them to my Linksys router and double my speed for my cable broadband service?

Thanks.

No. Gigabit Ethernet = 1000Mbps transfer rate. Your cable service is probably 10Mbps this would be the max transfer rate for the total number of computer connected to the single computer line. If that's too much for you, I'll explain it this way: Imagine your Gigabit Ethernet ports as a 10 lane super-highway, and imagine your cable line a two way street. Even if you added another 10 lanes to your super-highway (an extra Gig Ethernet port), you will have to go through that two way street (cable connection). Your cable connection speed is the bottleneck here. Hopefully this clears things up.

The only advantage to dual ports is to allow your computer to act as a gateway, attach to a LAN, or have an extra Ethernet cable for failover.