Passing thru 2-port 1Gb PCIe NIC to VMs

Hi All, 

Ran into an issue a little while back and was curious if anyone experienced the same. Current build is a asus prime x570 pro, ryzen cpu, msi 3060 passed through for gaming vm, and quite a few 7200/5400 HDDs and 2.5 inch SSDs for persistent storage (nvme SSD used for system cache) - running v6.9.2.

Since i run Plex as a container, as well as run a few VMs, i had the idea to add a PCIe NIC so that i can reduce the amount of traffic through the single 1GbE port on the mobo. Im probably not saturating that single mobo port, but im always tinkering and being able to add hardware is one of the aspects of unraid that i really enjoy - and this approach ensured i wouldnt be stomping on my plex traffic while I am gaming or downloading. 

So i followed space invaders tutorial on passing the PCIe NIC directly through to the VMs by updating the sys config file in Flash. Everything went as expected...i passed it through, giving 1 x port to my gaming VM and 1 x port to the 2nd VM i use for other tasks like downloading.  

The issue started with my 2nd VM that i download with. It would have an active connection to my VPN, but as soon as it started to pull a good amount of data via torrent, i would lose my RDP connection as well as the download connections. After a minute it would all return to normal, but it would do it again anytime i would restart the download. So i disabled the pcie nic in the VM settings and reenabled the onboard NIC. This cleared the issue. 

I continued to use the pcie NIC for my gaming VM and everything has been great on that side...but i now do not use the second port and do not do any LCAG/trunking since my core switch is kind of trash. 

Think passing through 2 NICs on the same pcie card to 2 x VMs is the issue?

Or maybe am i saturating the pcie card and amount of PCIe lanes that it has access to? 

Thank you all in advance!!