NIC card made for gamers

[Dr Mordrid]

GAWD....is that ever the truth

[Nowhere]

Womabt, exactly that'll be the case with my PC. (and BTW...most here/on those network has cheapest bough-in-store PCI cards (yep, you know who makes the chips on them...); but Intels and 3coms are cheap if bought used/after leasing/etc. Even integrated is often Realtek (cheap mobos))

[Wombat]

Well, I like the old Intel NICs. They're actually DEC "Tulip" chips, the 21x40. They work quite well.

[DGhost]

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)

it depends on what you are doing. for the vast majority of home users you simply do not need Gb networking.

The only thing I can think of off the top of my head (outside of business workstation/server applications) that benefits from the move between Mb and Gb networking is routinely copying large files. And honestly, most home users do not do that.

shit, I have not moved to Gb networking yet. The occasional times I have to move large amounts of data around are not common enough for me to worry about it. Video can be streamed well within the confines of 100Mbit networking, and using multicast allows you to make it happen for multiple hosts.

honestly, for gaming you do not need one of these. buying a good Intel Pro/100 would give you the same improvement over a RealTek GB integrated Nic.

similar but unrelated story. About 5 years ago I was involved in setting up a LAN party with a targetted attendance of 350 people. They had a monster backplane that supported 100MBit per port (and had some ridiculous internal bandwidth limits), but the only thing they could find to plug into it were 10 port 3Com 10MBit switchs that had a single 100MBit port. From a design standpoint it works quite well as it guarantees everyone on the switch has 10Mbit worth of bandwidth to the main switch. For a lan party, this is excellent because it guarantees that the guy sitting 6 chairs down from you isn't hogging the bandwidth you need while you try to compete in a tourney.

But no... it wasn't good enough for an extremely vocal group of hardware enthusiasts. waaa, 10Mbit sucks, waaaaa. etc etc. The *only* reason they were annoyed was the fact that it effectively prevented them from being able to leech files off of the network while they were there. This, being against the rules for obvious legal reasons, really didn't bother us much. it still raised quite a stink and we had a hell of a time dealing with it.

annnyyywaaayyyysss...

[Nowhere]

Yeah, not really saturating the bandwith of 100Mbit...but OTOH having dozens of connections active whole the time . So I guess it won't hurd to have very good hardware & drivers, especially if they can be obtained for the same price as Realtek...

[RichL]

similar but unrelated story. About 5 years ago I was involved in setting up a LAN party with a targetted attendance of 350 people. They had a monster backplane that supported 100MBit per port (and had some ridiculous internal bandwidth limits), but the only thing they could find to plug into it were 10 port 3Com 10MBit switchs that had a single 100MBit port. From a design standpoint it works quite well as it guarantees everyone on the switch has 10Mbit worth of bandwidth to the main switch. For a lan party, this is excellent because it guarantees that the guy sitting 6 chairs down from you isn't hogging the bandwidth you need while you try to compete in a tourney.

Couple of years back we had a 48 port 10/100 blade die in one of our Cisco 6509's With no space to repatch and no spare card onsite, I had to improvise.
I found 2 spare ports, plugged in a pair of 24 port 10mb 3Com HUBS and patched everyone into there.
96 users on the floor had 100mb full duplex each. 2 lots of 24 users had 10mb, half duplex shared between them.
With lots of "Bandwidth intensive" apps being run, I expected the very vocal anti-IT users to scream bloody murder.

Nobody even noticed

[Helevitia]

Another review. I think that this card has a huge potential side effect and that is the ability to run Linux on it and do other things with it. It's like a PC on a stick

http://www.gdhardware.com/hardware/networking/bigfoot/killer/review/001.htm

[Wombat]

Yeah.... So's your router.

Hele, you work at Cisco. Don't you have coworkers debunking these guys? Or even saying why it could work (unlikely)?

[Helevitia]

Nope, everyone I work with doesn't care about this kind of stuff. They are extra Geeky They are more excited about how we can do deep packet inspection on encrypted bit torrents and the best way to hardware switch the packets a line rate

Literally everyone on my team does not play computer games or owns an Xbox 360.

[Wombat]

Still, they should be quite qualified to explain why this card can't be doing what it claims to do. Just present it as a hypothetical, and ask how much performance it could give a machine.

[Jammrock]

Cisco makes their living off making data move faster. However, the NIC can only do so much when you're connected to the net via the cheapest cable/DSl modem your ISP could buy, on a shared connection with the rest of your neighborhood.

The only REAL way to test if the Killer NIC does a damn thing for ping times if you tested it on a large internal network. Say a QuakeCon, or some other large LAN party, where all the network equipment would be high speed, yet enough people playing that latency would be >5 ms.

Though the framerate increase on Helevitia's link is big enough that kids with too much cash will buy it, whether latency is much improved or not.

Jammrock

[Nowhere]

...and nevermind that the same/similar framerate increase could be obtained simply by directing cash to faster CPU/GFX...which are much more often more important to performance of the machine.

[az]

I also don't believe that framerate increase is real.

[Wombat]

The only REAL way to test if the Killer NIC does a damn thing for ping times if you tested it on a large internal network. Say a QuakeCon, or some other large LAN party, where all the network equipment would be high speed, yet enough people playing that latency would be >5 ms.

Measuring ping times is pretty meaningless anyway. It's trivial for a NIC to respond to ping instead of forwarding it on. But anything involving data still would have to be processed by the CPU.

Though the framerate increase on Helevitia's link is big enough that kids with too much cash will buy it, whether latency is much improved or not.

The framerates are bogus. They have to be. In at least some of the reviews I read, the small print says that Bigfoot is the one providing the numbers. In another, they're using a copy of F.E.A.R. provided by them (smells like quack3-ish manipulation to me).

Look, there's one common-sense way to think about those numbers: How much does your fps degrade playing the game single-player vs. multiplayer? I know mine doesn't drop that much. The Killer Instinct cards are "recovering" more performance than people possibly lost!

[Jammrock]

Measuring ping times is pretty meaningless anyway. It's trivial for a NIC to respond to ping instead of forwarding it on. But anything involving data still would have to be processed by the CPU.

Ping time is old gamer slang for latency, which is what this thing is supposed to speed up. Not that I think it would make any sort of noticable difference, if any at all. I think this card is a scam.

As for the framerates, I'll wait until some of the sites I trust get their hands on one to test before I trust any of it. I merely commented that people will believe sites like this and jump on the NIC thinking they'll get an easy frame rate boost.

If I'm proven wrong, I'm proven wrong. But I highly doubt it.