The DQ6 class of motherboards have a way of creating their own headlines as each revision comes into existence and GA-EP45-DQ6 has several landmark features to make the DQ6 family proud of this newcomer. On board, you'll find four PCIe based Realtek 8111C Gigabit LAN controllers and this is readily seen by the rear-I/O panel's impressive quad Gigabit LAN ports. Before your jaw drops to the floor, we'll jog your memory that this isn't the world's first consumer board with quad LAN ports - that honor while still belonging to Gigabyte, was first introduced in their nForce 680i implementation in the GA-N680SLI-DQ6 motherboard . So that makes the GA-EP45-DQ6 the second board in history to feature four Gigabit LAN ports.
That's not to say that that this isn't one-of-a-kind, because the Realtek Gigabit controllers as well as the new software stack now supports teaming functionality across all these ports which enables four discreet connections to act as a singe massive connection with four times the bandwidth. Simply put, you've the equivalent of a single 4Gbps connection at your disposal for an ultra high performance digital media home server. Factor in Duplex operational modes and your theoretically have an 8Gbps connection! And unlike previous onboard LAN incarnations, these new network connection standards support Receive Side Scaling (RSS) that helps balance network traffic load among dual-core processors for better overall system performance. Furthermore, the network ports and the software stack are more resilient than ever before with fault tolerance support. Should any link suffer from a hardware failure, it is able to prevent network downtime by transferring the load to the other remaining working ports - be it in teaming mode or not. Sounds almost as if you're getting an onboard router with this motherboard, doesn't it?
Motherboard Gigabyte EP45-DQ6
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