Gigabyte pushes quad-LAN motherboard

One use that immediately came to my mind was a media PC. Set a PC with this motherboard up near your TV and have one jack connected to your router and 3 connected to various PCs/Laptops.

This allows your PCs/Laptops to connect to to a web through a wireless router yet still maintain a wired connection to the media PC. Any scenario where you can throw out additional hardware and power adapters (such as a switch) or avoid running wires up/down some stairs is a good one.

Sharing a networked printer just became easier, and everyone knows the wireless adapter for the Xbox 360 is a rip off at $100.

The option is nice to have, but I wouldn't pay a premium for 4 ports over 2. 1 is usually more than I need, but I do find 2 to provide practical flexibility.

But if it means I can build a box, grab a network printer, buy a network attached storage box, run only 1 wire through the wall up to my router, and still have one port open in case someone with a laptop needs to transfer stuff quickly, that's great.

I'd probably use it as a central media/data hub on my home network. would be interesting to play with at any rate. I quite like the 8 USB ports too. Not that I would ever use 8 but we all know how tight some of those darling little USB appliances can be so the option of spacing is nice. Better than the usual round of legacy connectors they stick on the back to fill out the I/O plate anyway.

vmware virtual infrastructure likes lots of dedicated nics for the management and drs features , so would be handy. is the chipset actually beefy enough to push that IO

"In fact,we have no idea what on earth you would use four LAN ports for"

.... Have you lot never heard of VMWare??

I currently have 4 network cards in my server/router, but I'd add them one by one. If I was building such setup from scratch I would use normal router anyway.

Let me connect and share the bandwidth across four wifi connections, and I'll see a point.

Four ethernet, I guess if one breaks then you have multiple redundancies.

Maybe it's for people that want to turn their 4000$ computer into a router.

But I agree, there will be someone out there that will say they just can't live without four connections.

I do have a X38 board in my gaming rig with two gigabit ports teamed up for 2 gbit... I also have a home server with one onboard gigabit netcard for it's own dedicated internet connection, but also have a Intel PRO/1000 PT Quad adapter with pci express connector all 4 teamed as one 4 gbit... Bought a 3Com switch that supports it... So now i have network that can send faster than my harddrives can read... :p Running Cat 6E and a total of 5 pc's with gigabit NIC's... I like to think that i need it but the truth is that it's way to much for todays harddrives...

The only use I can think of is for home NAS's - team up 2-3 ports to max your bandwidth to the NAS - getting you close to 2-4Gb fibre-channel speeds.

Of course, that assumes that your NAS supports teaming it's NIC's, and that you run multiple network cables to it.

So, it's a pretty small niche area!

gigabyte has done this before with their 680i-DQ6 board which is in my main machine. and while 3 of the ports tend to remain empty ive made use of them getting together with friends and letting them use my machine as a switch. so it does have its uses.

I'm sorry but I don't see the point!!!!! Even for 2 ports I don't see point. Except you build an ISA server. 

Or someone found a way to plug this cables straight down the fiber optic lines used to connect continents?????

I can understand a 4 port/channel bluetooth or wifi card. I'm doing robotics programming, and the more bandwidth the better, but the applications are designed for multi-threading either way. 

We have several applications that we use a cluster of commodity boxes for. These boxes use network storage and having up to 4Gb of bandwidth means I don't have to buy something more expensive like fibre channel.

Better still, I can do other goofy things like using one port to connect to the server side network, another two ports to give me 2Gb of network storage and a final port for syncing the server to other boxes on the cluster.

I could find uses for it. I don't need one on every desktop, but I need at least dual ports on every server and more really is better.

Terminal servers love gigabit NICs. You can put 50 X clients on each. If they can build a 12 core CPU and huge RAM, we can use four NICs. One to the file server and three to gigabit switches and X clients. Even better with dual sockets and two CPUs. Sweet.

I have several friends that would love this feature on a motherboard. It works when you need more bandwidth then an ISP can offer. Then just make a service contract with 2 ISPs, 2 modems, 2 cables for input and 1 to hook up to your wifi router. Use a nifty load balancing software and you're all set. That makes 3 jacks usable and i'm sure that you can find another use for the last one.

Gigabit ethernet is too slow for SANs or even DASD, but at 10GbE they start to make sense.

This 4 port board could be used by someone setting up a small home network. If they don't already have a hub.

Server Rooms. We need two ports just for active/passive failover. For those who want to bond links, you need four: a pair of two way bonds, with failover.

...for clustering but not much benefit for sohos.

I, for one, am going "Yeeehaaaaa!"

Got a home rendering network and sometimes the large textures tend to choke the LAN up. I have to start up the render nodes one by one to avoid the initial sending out of textures to each render node to avoid the 'choke' problem... this is welcome news.

While I agree that quad network ports are unlikely to be useful for most, dual network ports are genuinely useful.

Myself, I use two--one for LAN (no firewall on that part) and one for WAN (firewalled). This lets local traffic be unencumbered by a flaky firewall which will inevitably screw up Windows file sharing and the like at the least convenient times.

It has multiple uses but exactly what depends what OS you run and the switching you hook it to.

One has to wonder about how it’s implemented in both hardware and drivers. 4 NICs can be a gigantic amount of overhead even if not all ports are in use. Just having the drivers loaded and running is a fair bit of load on the system. It’s even worse if the hardware isn’t taking a fair amount of processing away from the CPU. 

hmmm very interesting, what next 4 audio jacks???

Does the average person need it? Ha, no. Does the average person even know the difference between Mb and MB, or that getting 54N instead of 54G isn't going to make surfing the internet any faster? Not so much.

Are their people out there that have a 48 port managed Gigabit switch, 8 CAT6 lines run to each room, computers capabile of 802.3ad, and an Enterprise class server, capable of supporting the bandwidth? Yeah, but there aren't too many people that have done that in their house (besides me). 

Keep in mind with virtulization becomming big the next thing may be to run everything from the server. Right now gigabite ethernet trunking is a fairly cheap route for a high bandwidth solution. Although this may not do much in a home, in a computer heavy organization it might be a big help

The IPCop community drools for any system with onboard nics greater than 3. With the 2.6 kernel support just around the corner, this would make a fantastic "appliance" board.

There's at least one calculation I'd like to do which would benefit a lot from three independent gigabit links between each of four computers, and at the moment quad-gigabit-ethernet PCIe boards cost £250 each. If the pricing's right (IE vastly cheaper than Infiniband or Myrinet) these might be nice for making small highish-performance Beowulves.

Why do these motherboard manufactures insist on using rubbish LOM implementations?

Did they not learn anything from the 875p/ICH5(R) without CSA LOM all those years ago?

I won't consider an Intel based board with ICH9 without the 82566 LOM in some form, the same goes for ICH10 and 82567.

I find everyone's commentary very interesting but perhaps just a little off the mark in a variety of ways.

First, what's so good about throwing out additional hardware, when you're then relying on a piece of hardware that draws at least twice the energy (of an inexpensive switch) to be the focal point of your network?

Now bear in mind that Giga-Byte is in the business of making enthusiast boards, not server boards, and their site has no mention of a P45 line at all, so maybe I'm jumping to a few conclusions here, but...

Sure, VMware will use those NICs, but are you really going to use an enthusiast motherboard for a mission critical business system?

Sure, you could do a 4GB team, but since you can bet your @$$ those aren't going to be co-processed NICs you'll be dragging a 3+ GHz box to its knees if you can somehow push that data rate.

Sure, you could build a 50-user (or even 200-user) Terminal Server, but ya' ain't gonna do it on a Giga-Byte motherboard fellas. And if you think you're going to use that as a production solution for any business, let me know who you work for so I can blacklist the company. Or let me know who your clients are so I can make a fortune fixing their messes.

Likewise anyone who thinks they're going to be putting these boards onto a cluster or into a glass room somewhere. There's a reason for the "server board" classification, kids.

Appliances are an interesting idea but again, and maybe this is just my personal prejudice after dealing with a Giga-Byte motherboard whose drivers even after two years of updates were never 100% stable, but I'd sooner see an appliance built with a leaner, better engineered and more thoroughly QA'd motherboard equipped with respected co-processed NICs.

As always, YMMV.

This isn't in any way better than a stand-alone switch, let alone the fact that your crazy network will stop working when you need to reboot or turn off this computer.

Sounds like an IP-routing nightmare. Anyone who ever had to manage a complex LAN knows what I'm talking about.

The only thing more useful that this motherboard is a HD-DVD player with 4 Gig-E ports in the rear. 

I work at a major network equipment vendor, and my pc currently has 3 LAN cards plugged in for development (the motherboard lan jack is use to connect to the company lan). 

If I had this board, i could set up more complex networks and test scenarios at my desk instead of having to go to the test room

how about a motherboard manufacturor other than intel putting a someway decent NIC onto the mobo. All these boards will have nvidia, broadcom (and not the good NICs either), marvell or realtek. Quite typically, these are cheap ass chips that have hardware bugs and/or missing features. 

A mobo with NICs that support jumbo frames, VLAN hardware tagging etc, would be far more appealing. 
With VLANs you no longer need a cable for net, and with VRRP/CARP you no longer need a cable to provide HA/failover/heartbeat.

FreeNas and IPCop come immediately to mind. Throw in the cheapest processor and RAM you can find and you have a hard-core extensibel router/switch(/Network Storage box).