New Bigfoot Killer nic?

[daviddoran]

I remember the concensus las time killer nic had a product out that it was a waste of $200. Now it's $70, and supposedly improved. Has anyone used it?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833189002

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Frankly, I'm surprised they can charge money for these. Any of the higher-end NICs from Intel/Broadcom do almost the exact same things, except for the value-add software installed on top of everything. Which, I might add, can be covered by other software apps that are usually free. If you go into the advanced NIC properties for Intel 82xxx and Broadcom NICs, they expose a lot of the options you can tweak to do the same basic thing this one does.

Of course, I'm just talking shit without ever owning one. I still think it's snake oil.

[daviddoran]

I don't believe the hype either, its likely that most people who saw improvement were simply using bad drivers on their onboard NIC. I just can't help but think that if they are still selling this product, that there might be some truth to it, however small.

[MiRai]

Yeah I can't see taking up a PCIe slot for this either. However, Gigabyte and Bigfoot are teaming up:

http://www.gigabyte.com/MicroSite/259/models.htm

[Ualaa]

I had the original, still do actually in my secondary PC that rarely gets booted up.

I liked that you could plug an external hard drive into it.
And then run a torrent/download through the NIC.
Which supposedly would give your download as much bandwidth as possible, without taking anything from the gaming bandwidth; as in give it everything left over, without slowing the game down.

The Killer was supposed to reduce your game ping by 20-30ms, which even if it were true wouldn't really be noticeable in any games.
It advertised slightly faster load times, when initially entering the game.
Until getting an SSD, load times were not noticeably different.

My thoughts were basically... very small improvements (not sure if there were improvements), too small to really notice.
But an extra piece to get, if you wanted to waste money to have the best of the best, in every category.

[Mokoi]

I just can't help but think that if they are still selling this product, that there might be some truth to it, however small.

Don't be fooled. People have been selling religion for thousands of years too, with no correlation to the truth. They would probably still be selling us the flat earth and slavery thing if we didn't intervene.

[Sam DeathWalker]

I review this item in depth on my web site.

Short answer: Spend yur monies on something else.