NIC Teaming and its advantages?

[Thermite]

I have an Asus x99 deluxe motherboard, and It has two intel nic's. My first question is what is the difference between the two nic's on my motherboard. "Intel I218V" and "Intel I211-AT" Then what type of Ethernet cable can these support and what is the best cable to use for speeds (eg. cat5 or cat6)? Then can my motherboard support teaming with its two nics, and if so what are the advantages and disadvantages of this.

 

I know there is a lot of questions here, but any information would be greatly appreciated.

[Samfisher]

No idea what the differences are, and I'd go Cat6 cos here Cat5 cables are pretty hard to find.

 

A couple of teaming modes.  Most common ones are failover (one dies and 2nd takes over), aggregate (basically load balancing) and one more I forgot he name of.  Basically each go to different switches and connectivity changes if one dies.  Almost 5am, eyes are blurry so I might be missing a few important things but basically yea...

 

@Thermite

[MARSTG]

The Cat6 are for 1Gbps while cat5 are for 100mbps. There are no disadvantages to NIC teaming, main advantage would be speed, you can upload and download on different paths at the max speed of the card, if your network and other infrastructure allows it, like the drive where you read and write from. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation#Use_on_network_interface_cards

[EmeraldFlame]

The Cat6 are for 1Gbps while cat5 are for 100mbps.

This isn't quite correct Cat6 is capable of 10Gbps, CAT5e is rated for 1Gbps, and Cat5 is 100Mbps (and is theoretically capable of 1Gbps for extremely short runs)

[Thermite]

This isn't quite correct Cat6 is capable of 10Gbps, CAT5e is rated for 1Gbps, and Cat5 is 100Mbps (and is theoretically capable of 1Gbps for extremely short runs)

Thanks I appreciate it.

[EmeraldFlame]

Thanks I appreciate it.

 

No problem, As far as Teaming goes though, to answer your questions more directly, there are a couple types, the big 2 @Simfisher talked a bit about earlier. There really are no disadvantages to teaming, other than cost, it is simply more expensive to implement. Typically significantly more expensive. As far as whether you MoBo supports it, I have no idea. Most boards are setup to failover automatically. But for aggregate unless you have greater than 1Gbps from your ISP or if you have other computer in your home network that also support teaming, along with switches and routers that support it, you aren't going to see any difference.