Killer NIC

[Michael]

Has anyone looked into the Killer NIC, the network card "designed for gamers"?

http://www.bigfootnetworks.com/KillerOverview.aspx

The NIC itself runs a "highly optimized version of embedded Linux".

After the card hits retails shelves, we will likely dissect this card in a review at Phoronix.

[1c3d0g]

Good, I'm looking forward to what this NIC has to offer. It would be nice to stress it thoroughly with a BitTorrent program downloading/seeding a Linux distro and see if it can hold on for prolonged periods of time.

[Rob Williams]

I'm extremely skeptical here. For $20 more than what the Killer NIC costs, I could buy a second 7900GT. I mean geez.

The main problem with 'hardcore' gamers and lag is the fact that they run BitTorrent in the background. I think common sense would tell them to either throttle the upload speed, or turn it off entirely.

For the proposed $270 price tag, I can't see this going anywhere.

[Svartalf]

I'm extremely skeptical here. For $20 more than what the Killer NIC costs, I could buy a second 7900GT. I mean geez.

The main problem with 'hardcore' gamers and lag is the fact that they run BitTorrent in the background. I think common sense would tell them to either throttle the upload speed, or turn it off entirely.

For the proposed $270 price tag, I can't see this going anywhere.

It's little more than a transport offload engine. You can very probably wire together an OpenRisc 1200 and an off-the-shelf NIC for this thing at the 10/100 speed levels and expect it to be the same as the Killer card. In reality, there's very little to offload in UDP- checksumming and copy avoidance are the only things there and a good modern NIC will do that for you. Lag is caused by latencies in the NIC, yes, but it's also caused by CPU utilization. Now, TCP Offload, it's a little more compelling, but you're going to go from 10-20% CPU use for pushing 100Mbits peak, to something like 3-7%- but sacrifice any security features in the network stack because you just overtook it. TCP Offload is only remotely compelling to people when you're talking 10G Ethernet speeds.

If you were that heavily loaded, it might slow down framerate a little- but in reality, this device, since it's not going to be more than a gigabit ethernet card, is little more than something to part cash from the clueless amongst the hardcore gamer crowd.

[1c3d0g]

Perhaps some caffeine-overloaded freaks will get a thrill when they see a 0.1 FPS improvement in their online play...

[Patrick]

From what Svartalf said this NIC would only perform to its maximum potential if the 100Mbs connection was completely saturated. How many online or LAN games really use that much bandwidth? While playing ET online I see occasional spikes to 100KBs but that's it. Does anyone that runs a game server use the full 100Mbs?

[3lit3]

Wow , YOU GUYS really need to see this card in action .. I saw the proto-type at a LAN PARTY IN L.A.and YES it does work. This guy borrowed an ethernet card ..installed it, got into a bf2 internet server ... recorded the framerate and ping with fraps ... then took the old ethernet card out .. installed the killer nic card ... entered the same server as before .. and his ping went from 66 down to 26..and framerates went up as well, he also installed it in anyones pc who wanted to see it in action ... .. so I AM SOLD.. im getting 2.. i hope everyone out there has the same mentality about the killer nic as most of you guys do . that way i got a better chance of whipping some @$$ in bf2.
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[Michael]

Interesting bit of information, thanks for passing it along, and welcome to the forums.

Any other information to share about your experience with the card at the LAN?

[Rob Williams]

Haha, "im getting 2" almost makes me think this is the actual company posting. $600 for NIC's is a little extreme. I look forward to seeing it in action regardless. Though I think it is still a load of crap, I am willing to give it a chance.

[Michael]

HardOCP has some information up @ http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/articl...50aHVzaWFzdA==