NIC card made for gamers

[ZokesPro]

I think it would be put to better use with a different OS or a different type of system instead of a gaming machine. I doubt that XP could really take advantage of a piece of hardware like that.

[Wombat]

Of course it can't. Nothing can.

If something like this were useful/necessary, it would already be out there, for years already. After all, if ping and performance matter to little old you, what about the hosting services?

[ZokesPro]

Of course it can't. Nothing can.

If something like this were useful/necessary, it would already be out there, for years already. After all, if ping and performance matter to little old you, what about the hosting services?

What do you mena by little old you?

[Wombat]

I mean "guy at home with a <$5000 PC," as opposed to Google, or webhosts, or Blizzard's WoW sites, or all the BF2/CS/whatever server farms out there. People that spend millions on their network connectivity, people who max out their server farms, people who give 6-, 7-, 8-figure checks to Cisco, or 3com, or whomever.

The market's been there, and these other companies would have been all over it if a NIC could really make at much of a difference. I've got plenty of $1,000 NICs at work already. If a $250 card could do this for gamers, a $2,000 card could have done it for the professional environment, and made a bigger profit. Ergo...

[agallag]

There are plenty of cards out there that would surely outperform this thing. There are "multifunction" nics for servers that include TCP/IP offload engines, SSL processing in hardware, integrated iSCSI (SCSI over ethernet, really cool alternative to fibre channel), RDMA (remote direct memory access), and lots of other cool stuff.

When combined with sufficiently fancy switches, you can even set up two of the NICs in a team, either for auto-failover, or for load balancing (doubling bandwidth).

Check out this bad boy: http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/s...80t/index.html

And it's only $399. The single port PCI-X version is $279. That's retail too. Nobody pays retail for server parts. We normally get up to 40% off.

Another thing, if that KillerNIC is holding data around long enough to fill a 64MB buffer, something is seriously wrong. I'm not saying it won't outperform a cheap onboard NIC, but it certainly isn't anything special.

[Jon P. Inghram]

Everyone knows having an RWIN of 67,108,864 greatly improves gaming performance!

[Nowhere]

BTW, since a lot of poeple in-the-know watch this thread now...when it comes to highest performance for desktop user, Intel only? (simply any model? Or perhaps server version give some benefits?) 3com - not quite? (I seem to remember reading somewhere that while they are very solid, not quite in the class of Intel)

[Taz]

3com - not quite? (I seem to remember reading somewhere that while they are very solid, not quite in the class of Intel)

I would have put them above Intel for desktop NIC's back in the days of the 3C980 Now that pretty much every PC and server come with an onboard NIC('s) there's not much activity in the standalone NIC market.

[agallag]

If you want consistent reliable desktop performance, it's hard to go wrong with the Intel Pro1000 series. The server market has been dominated by Broadcom chipset products for a while now.

[Wombat]

It's hard to say there's clear winners these days. The onboard stuff usually works pretty well, especially with the dedicated data channels. It's hard to saturate a Gb connection without having other factors being the bottleneck instead.

[agallag]

My onboard nForce controller has been pretty good, but I've had bad luck with some realtek stuff. The performance is generally good, but you can have the odd "pause" or packet loss. Your results may vary, and of course if you're not doing tons of big data transfers, anything available these days would probably be fine.

[Wombat]

That's a good point. It's been a while since I've worked with Realtek cards, but I generally didn't like them. Processor hogs, and that's IF they worked.

[Nowhere]

Wombat, but it's easy to saturate 100Mbit connection - not everywhere there is Gigabit (the place to which I'm moving has good network, with top network gear...but since it was built few years ago)

[Wombat]

Yeah, 100Mbit. But where would you be that you're on 100Mbit network and your PCs don't already have a Gbit link built in? I can't justify buying another card in that situation.

[Technoid]

Realtek (Realcrap) is the plague of network