Dual Gigabit Ethernet with Nvidia Teaming
There is actually a point to having multiple LAN ports on your motherboard, it’s called Teaming:
Dual Gigabit Ethernet with Teaming
Teaming allows the two connections to work together to provide up to twice the Ethernet bandwidth for transferring large amounts of data from home file servers to other PCs. It also provides network redundancy through fail-over capability.
It’s a Nvidia Technology that is included in the NForce chipset drivers since the Nforce 500 series.
To make teaming work, you connect both your network ports to the switch and enable teaming on the forceware application. Simple.
Both Gigabit Connections will be used for downloading *from* your PC. Other computers will see both network devices as one computer with one IP and teaming ‘routes’ the requests through both network ports on your motherboard. That means 2 Gbps download to other nodes, (but only 1Gbps upload for yourself).
PDF from Nvidia’s site about DualNet, Teaming and Failover
The major benefit that I have experienced is during a LAN when someone starts copying stuff from your PC, your gaming isn’t effected at all! No ping drop or mini system freeze, network gaming as smooth as a baby’s bottom. The increased performance also helps with hosting a game as more bandwidth is available to clients.
Nvidia also mentions that teaming functions as a failover device for networking, but how often does a single network port, cable or switch port fail?… not often, a nice-to-have feature yes, but the performance gain is the real winner.
Another wow feature from the NForce 5,6 & 7 series is the First Packet Technology, amazingly easy and extremely efficient network prioritizing system, I haven’t seen any other QoS system work so well or that you can just add a folder to the priority list. No jokes, just select the list of folders that you want to prioritize, as easy as that. I just add my games drive 
More on Nvidia’s FirstPacket Technology
A big HOO-HAA to Nvidia for once again, just giving us that little extra!
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I see a lot of people reached this post on a search for:
“download nvidia teaming”
Teaming comes with your Nvidia *NForce* motherboard drivers.
Can be downloaded at: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us
note: your motherboard must include Teaming in its list of features and must have more than one network port, obviously.
I have the 790i ultra (got a sweet deal) my question is that with network teaming do I take two separate cat5 run from my router (which is connected to DSL Modem) to the dual NIC onboard. Or is this function only to be used with LAN?
Scott, you will have teaming working from your mobo to the router and from there just a single ‘line’ to the ADSL modem and thus to the internet.
Although your mobo can handle double the speed to the router, the router can only send the standard 10/100/1000 to the modem.
Even if the modem had two network ports with DHCP and was connected with two cables to your mobo, you will still be limited to your WAN connection speed (which isn’t nearly as fast as the switch speed on the modem or PC).
In the case that you might even have two ADSL lines connected to the internet, Nvidia teaming wouldn’t work over an ADSL internet connection.
Dual Gigabit Ethernet is the same concept as ISDN was back in the days of 56K. Run two of the same devices parallel and you get the benefit of multiplied bandwidth?? To cash in on the full benefit of teaming or Dual Gigabit Ethernet (DEG) you would have to be connected to a network with A = Sufficient Bandwidth in this case over 2GB and B = Network Devices that can support the bandwidth i.e. Modem, Router and/ or Switch(s) with Gigabit Ethernet. So long as there is no bottle necking from any of your Network Devices then you should be able to harness the full potential of DEG Teaming!
The article and indeed PDF are very misleading stating that you can double bandwidth. Although details are sketchy on how they achieve this, the Load Balancing algorithm appears to be on a per host basis. This means if you transfer data to and from a single host you can never exceed 1Gbps. The only time you can exceed this is if you are talking to multiple hosts at the same time.
Jip Ben, it’s only for multiple clients. The article might be a little misleading but it does state that the double bandwidth from the dual network is for multiple ‘downloading’ clients seeing as the clients can’t exceed 1Gbps.
[...] Dual Gigabit Ethernet with Nvidia Teamin [...]
20,000 hits « Welcome to the Fallout said this on April 15, 2009 at 11:43 pm |
So would this help me if i setup on my HTPC ? I would have this downloading /uploading/streaming form /to my NAS and then simultaneously downloading from the internet (nic-switch-router-modem-internet) at the same time as streaming and copy to/from my NAS (nic-switch-NAS(gbit)) ?
Short Answer: No
QoS – Would not be used seeing as your router would do this and streaming/downloading won’t easaly exceed your gigabit connection.
2 Physical Ports – Would also but be used since you’ll have a switch.
Teaming – Downloading from the internet and Nas to your HTPC would not get any benefits seeing as Teaming only work for uploading (from the HTPC point of view).
Teaming – Uploading (Data from HTPC to other devices) would not benefit your transfer speeds because even with a 10Mb internet connection, it’s only a tenth of your Gb LAN bandwidth. Streaming HD is downloading for the nic’s point of view, so Teaming isn’t in effect. Uploading from HTPC to NAS would use a lot of bandwidth on the LAN, but there would probably not be any other bandwidth hungry devices transfering from HTPC to them.
Teaming, in your case would only have been worth it, if the NAS could make use of it or if teaming worked with downloading.
In theory yes – but can you really stream 1Gbps (125MBytes/s) to/from your NAS? Also, don’t forget TCP uses sliding windows to cope with congested links. Assuming you did manage to saturate your NIC, all your TCP connections would start to back off so that one connection doesn’t starve the others. You might have problems if you are streaming large volumes of UDP packets, as they could potentially starve your TCP connections.