[MoMetal]

So I randomly stumbled across an online add for Bigfoot's Killer NIC gameing network card. It's not exactly cheap and makes some big claims on their website. That warm fuzzy feeling inside tells me that if it sounds too good to be true yadda yadda yadda. So does anyone understand all the techno mombo jumbo they talk about in it's features or have you ever used one or known a guy who new a guy? Anyways, take a look here and tell me what you think. As always, I appreciate your input.

Matt

[Advertisements]

Most of the reviews on the card say that gamers could not tell if the card was in the computer when playing. For a very expensive card that does not sound very good at all. Maybe someday when network speeds can be obtained by the computers it might work well, but i don't see the value of it right now.

SRX660

[SRX660]

Most of the reviews on the card say that gamers could not tell if the card was in the computer when playing. For a very expensive card that does not sound very good at all. Maybe someday when network speeds can be obtained by the computers it might work well, but i don't see the value of it right now.

SRX660

[dsenette]

another thing to consider when weighing the validity of such devices is the actual location of the bottleneck.....i'd say that more than half of your latency in any networking situation comes from 2 or 3 pieces of equipment. the router in your house, the ISP supplied modem, and the router that the modem is connecting to at the ISP....the only one of those that you can do anything about is the router in your house...doesn't matter how your NIC prioritizes the traffic, once it hits your home router and ESPECIALLY once it hits the ISP's equipment all of the QOS that that fancy NIC adds to the packet stream gets dropped

[james_8970]

I suggest reading this review here. It's dated, but the stats still stand today. In the end, the Killer card is not even worth considering.
http://forum.ncix.co...d...0&subpage=1


There is a Intel discrete ethernet card that performs similar to the killer networking card, at a fraction of the price. Intel has since released an even better card (Intel PRO/1000 GT), that still retails for ~30$ for the PCI version and ~40$ for the PCIe version. Personally, I've found that my ping has lowered, in some cases by as much as 20-30ms. However, as Dsnette mentioned, the limiting factor is in 99.9% of the cases out of your control and is associated with your ISP and the distance from you to the server. In my personal experience, the further the server, the greater the difference between onboard and this discrete ethernet card, though this is difficult to determine due to peak times and such. For a measly $30, you're not really risking anything, though as it has already been mentioned, don't expect much of a gain, if anything at all. Also to be added, these cards do remove the networking load off the CPU (abit, this is a very small load) so you may even see marginal gains in FPS, though the gains will be EXTREMELY minor (e.g. less then 1FPS).
James

Edited by james_8970, 03 July 2008 - 08:33 PM.