My PFSense machine has a single Dual Port gigabit Intel Nic and 2 Quad port nics, as well as a single port nic and an onboard nic. All, bar the dual port nic are on PCI-Express ports. The Dual port nic is a PCIX card in a PCI slot...
I think once you have the bandwidth on the motherboard to support it, you should be grand. Checking Wikipedia, the slowest PCI-Express connections are 250Mbytes (2 Gigabits) per second for a 1x slot. And then multiply that by the number of Xes in the slot (the cards I have are 4x cards and are on either 4 or 8x slots. 4x card is 8Gigabits a second). Different generations give different speeds too... more details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express Long story short, I don't think it matters as long as you have a fast enough bus... biggest advantage is lower space requirements... biggest disadvantage I can think is if you lose one card, you lose booth ports... --Tiernan -----Original Message----- From: List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Joe Laffey Sent: Saturday 21 February 2015 23:26 To: pfSense Support and Discussion Mailing List Subject: [pfSense] Dual Port NIC ports Hi, Is there any advantage or disadvantage to using the the two port on a dual port NIC vs. one port each on two different dual port NICs? I am building a new box, and it has two dual port Intel NICs (as well as a "legacy" Intel NIC and a couple of Marvels on the mobo). Does it matter at all which interfaces I put on which ports of those dual port NICs? A lot of data (video frames) is frequently moved between the DMZ and the LAN. So I would want that to be the fastest. (Sorry if this goes through twice. I sent from the wrong address the first time and it was rejected.) Thanks, -- Joe Laffey The Stable Visual Effects http://TheStable.tv/?e37581M/ _______________________________________________ pfSense mailing list https://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list Support the project with Gold! https://pfsense.org/gold _______________________________________________ pfSense mailing list https://lists.pfsense.org/mailman/listinfo/list Support the project with Gold! https://pfsense.org/gold
