Legit Reviews

Why would you need them and how do you connect both? Why is a single controller not enough? I keep seeing motherboard reviews where a pair of these seem to be a must feature for gaming. Why and is there any other application that can employ two controllers?

I assume you mean just two RJ45 plugs on the I/O, my assumption was for failover or in case one dies but I suppose you could set them up half-duplex and use one for receiving and one for outgoing packets, but either way is limited by switch/router, so.... meh. I know it's failover for servers anyway

I was thinking of this line: "To connect you to the interweb there are a pair of Realtek 8111G Gigabit Ethernet controllers built into the board to get the job done."
Read more at http://www.legitreviews.com/ecs-z87h3-a ... A3rcgmX.99

So why is having two ethernet controllers a key feature?

I think it's more so you can run 2 in a version of NIC RAID (aka Teaming). Realtek has an app to do this but I could never get it to work with my old board.

Hm, The article says it's an essential feature of the MOBO but nobody's sure why
Does anyone know for sure?

Simple:

If you want to connect to two different networks
If you want the reduncancy of two network links
If you want link aggregation, ieee 802.xx - this way you could have a 2GBps connection to another network device or client
A seperate network link to your NAS/SAN storage
To run your PC as a gateway/firewall with one link to the internet and the other for your LAN

kenc51 wrote:Simple:

If you want to connect to two different networks
If you want the reduncancy of two network links
If you want link aggregation, ieee 802.xx - this way you could have a 2GBps connection to another network device or client
A seperate network link to your NAS/SAN storage
To run your PC as a gateway/firewall with one link to the internet and the other for your LAN

Thanks. This is the answer I was lokking for

No problem