Is it because of an unmanaged switch?

[Guest asrequested]

I had originally read that these NIC cards would take strain off the CPU for delegating network traffic.

I also read that they helped to achieve full 1 gig transfer rates between pc's.

 

I have only ever seen 50mb/s max when moving files around the network. Which is strange, I think.

 

Without LACP, the best you can hope for is multipath through Windows. Basically only one line is used until the bandwidth is exceeded and then another line is added and so on. 1 gig is around 125MB/s. If you're using standard mechanical drives to read from and write to, how fast you move data will depend on their capabilities. And if you are moving a lot of small files, that will slow it down, too. If you really want to test your network, you should read from an SSD and write to an SSD. They will exceed the 1 gig bandwidth. Or you can play with this

 

Here's a quick test I just did

 

Edited February 20, 2018 by Doofus

[Guest asrequested]

One more thing. I believe multipath only works between similar windows machines and using the same amount of ports. If you really want improved network bandwidth, with ease....GO 10G It isn't that expensive, anymore. It's made a huge difference, for me. Moving large files around in seconds is so much better. And less cabling than multipath/LACP, with greater bandwidth.