System and method of a pace engine for governing the different transmission rates tailored for different connections by rate pacing a plurality of queues are described. Roughly described, the pace engine includes a binning controller for receiving queues from a transmit DMA queue manager and determines the earliest allowed time for a particular queue that is stored and paced in a Work Bin, a Fast Bin, or a Slow Bin. A pace table stores information about the minimum inter-packet-gap for each connection that is coupled to the transmit DMA queue manager. A timer is coupled to the binning controller with a multi-bit continuous counter that increments at a predetermined time unit and wraps around after a predetermined amount of time.