What do you think of KillerNIC ?

[Yubox]

Heya folks!

As you may see this is my first post on these forums and iam pretty new to the scene. Ive started multiboxing since yesterday and i do like it !! :D
The only thing i dont like is that its not really syncronized due to the ping.The normal players ping is arround 60-90 but if you had a ping of .. say 10, you and other players would almost see no difference in the movement of your chars.

And now comes my idea. I recently found this Network card called KillerNC (http://www.killernic.com/) wich claims to upgrade your performance eg, ping alot. So ive wondered if one of you is allready using this card and if its worth buying it.

If it werent so expensive ( 200$) i would have bought me one allready.

btw, sry for my bad english :)


Heres a pic of it and yes it does look monster :thumbsup:

http://images.dailytech.com/nimage/2076_large_killernic.pnghttp://www.killernic.com/products/nic.aspx

[Quix]

its not a horrible nic, but it's way overpriced for what it delivers. Network latency has many factors, probably the least of which is someones NIC card on modern comps.

Save that 200$ for ram or Vid card upgrades imo.

There were some tests of this thing that showed it did have some positive impact on wow on slower computers, so again its not completely worthless, but I can think of better things to blow 200$ on.

[Yubox]

Hmm so you think it doesnt increase the speed you can play all your chars at once? I know its well overprices but arent all ppl here havin lots of money to spend on? :)
Ive read tests about it that it very slightly decrease your lag in games like cs, but havent saw anything tested for wow yet. Just wondering if one of you guys got such a card and for how much the latency dropped.

[Cripes]

one of the tests was with WoW. It did reduce lag + increase fps.

But running 5 WoW clients, interested to see the results :p

[BobGnarly]

There is only one of these network accelerator ideas that seems to hold any merit, imo. Basically what it does is implements the TCP/UDP/IP stack(s) on the card, and let the card handle the overhead of all of these protocols, freeing the CPU for application processing. Basically, they just hotwire all the socket connections down to the card at the driver layer, bypassing the microsoft protocol layers. I have no idea if that's this card or not, but the pic looks kinda familiar.

This has potential, but you have to ask how much overhead is in the protocol stack for windows? I really have no idea, but I can see how this could help some. How much, I'm not sure, but my guess is not enough to justify $200.

But hey, if you try it out, we can know for sure. :)

[aetherg]

It does take some work off the CPU, and will process packets a little bit faster than your average NIC. But overall it probably makes much less difference than another gig of RAM.

[aetherg]

Here is a very in-depth review with tests on several games.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2865

[Eteocles]

For $200 I could buy 4GB of dual-channel DDR2 ram...take a guess which will help more lol

I think the long n short of it is, the card COULD be a boon, but the price right now is not worth the minimal gains vs other, same-cost options

[kibbles]

Totally agree with Eto and everyone else here.

Speaking as a network engineer (not a hardware engineer) decreasing your ping times a couple of miliseconds is about the absolute best I can see out of a network card and, to be honest, even that's unlikely.

In a game like wow 5-10ms better ping times isn't going to do much for you at all.

Spend the money on memory like Eto says -- it'll help you a ton more than this card will.

[d0z3rr]

I'm going to buy that card solely for the "Bling" factor. :D But the cool thing is it has a modified version of Unix running on it.

[Sarduci]

I expected more out of anandtech, the whole idea is flawed and they even state it. Once the packet leave you last locally controlled network point, it's completely at the mercy of your provider, their provider, their backbone uplink, router conditions and if anywhere in the could they are doing traffic shaping or have a cruddy ATM (no, not the cash machine) link and many, many other conditions. If the NIC is making any difference, it's because you're either sending too much network traffic and the card driver is set to offload TCP/IP (which makes the NIC do it) or you have some PCI bottleneck that's choking out the card.

Fix what you can on your end (video card, ram, disk drives, cpu, cooling system - yes, cooler running systems perform better) and you'll be much happier.

Yeah, it is mega bling-bling, more if it ran Linux and could make you toast or better yet install it in your toaster so it makes your toast even faster and then your toaster would be running Linux.... :thumbup: *drool*

You can also get a 5 to 10ms better response time by drinking lots of red bull...... think Tweak from south park.......

File this one under snakeoil and the cure for baldness..... still waiting on that last one though.. ;(

[butta]

From the results and reviews I've seen on this card, there's ZERO reason to buy it from a practical standpoint. I think of it like trying to overclock a 56k modem -- its just the wrong piece of hardware to completely pimp out.

[Sarduci]

From the results and reviews I've seen on this card, there's ZERO reason to buy it from a practical standpoint. I think of it like trying to overclock a 56k modem -- its just the wrong piece of hardware to completely pimp out.

Wrong.

The KillerNIC really does what it claims. Reduces CPU overhead to incease network performance. Its not bullshit. Its just INSANELY overpriced.A 100mb card can only run at 100mb, and most people with dsl/cable top out practically at 3mb. Any increase in performance shows a definite bottleneck somewhere else in the system that needs to be addressed or it's simply a band-aid for a larger overall issue that may show up again in a different way. If it was a payload encryption/decryption engine, then I'd have to say it'd have some merit as a normal CPU is general purpose compared to a FPGA designed for a specific task which is found on that kind of card and it would put undue stress on anything but a high end system. A properly sized system should get zero gain from this device. An undersized system may show a net gain but only as an indicator to a different issue that should be looked at - or as my old coworker would say: Buy a new one!