Why does this mobo have this feature??

[KiloAlphaIndigo]

2 Gigabit Ethernet ports.

 

Why?

[Enderman]

Redundancy.

My motherboard has two too.

I can also choose what NIC I want my servers to use.

[BattleFrogue]

There are multiple reasons why you might want duel gigabit ethernet on a board. Especially ITX where you don't have the luxury of an add in ethernet card presuming that you'll populate the pcie slot with a gpu. You can have one port dedicated to an internet connection and another dedicated to internal file transfers over a server. You can team your connection for 2 gigabit if you really need the extra speed. Linus has demonstrated a lot of these in previous videos, I think the 10gb ethernet on the cheap video covers most of them

[KiloAlphaIndigo]

2 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Redundancy.

My motherboard has two too.

I can also choose what NIC I want my servers to use.

Any real-world benefit to me plugging both into router/network switch?

[KiloAlphaIndigo]

1 minute ago, BlackRogue said:

There are multiple reasons why you might want duel gigabit ethernet on a board. Especially ITX where you don't have the luxury of an add in ethernet card presuming that you'll populate the pcie slot with a gpu. You can have one port dedicated to an internet connection and another dedicated to internal file transfers over a server. You can team your connection for 2 gigabit if you really need the extra speed. Linus has demonstrated a lot of these in previous videos, I think the 10gb ethernet on the cheap video covers most of them

So [realistically] if I plugged both into my network switch, would it help transfer speeds between my PC and NAS/other PCs on the network, maybe even reliability of connection to the router for broadband?

[BattleFrogue]

If both computers involved in the transfer have 2 Gigabit connections they yes, teaming them would increase transfer speeds. If they are different they will transfer at the maximum speed of the slowest connection. If you team the connections to the router however then incoming traffic from multiple 1 gigabit connections would not be bottlenecked until you reach the 2 gigabit limit. I am unsure about reliability however but it would be relatively low risk since this is something that has been done for years

[Stefan Payne]

19 minutes ago, KiloAlphaIndigo said:

Any real-world benefit to me plugging both into router/network switch?

Depends on what you are using it for.

One of the possible usages is as a Router -> Internet in, routed out. Though not that common these days.

Another possibility is to double the transfer rate when combining both NIC Ports.
You should have the option in Windows...