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Has anyone tried the Killer NIC card from bigfootnetworks? Im thinking that maybe there will be a noticeable difference in heavy raids or for multiboxers?
Im open to the possibility of network card bottlenecking if you load five dalaran at once with raid-0 ssd and have a very fast internet connection.
Ive tried one of the older models but I returned it as the onboard nic worked better for me :p
Huge difference in cities and bgs, there are other posts on the subject as well.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pycno
SSD in raid 0 but bliz wont send you data any faster
If you are downloading other things, while also playing games...
The Killer cards will prioritize your gaming, which basically means...
Your game gets as much bandwidth as it can handle.
And your downloads go as fast as possible, without slowing the game at all.
So, if you're just playing warcraft and that is it.
There won't be any noticeable improvement.
I've got a killer card, that's my observation.
Killers do more than priority queuing, blocking non-game traffic (while you obviously should just stop running that stuff doing during your game play), and tweak networking settings.
They fully offload the stack to the card. They also handle a few chatty directx update methods and requeue them. Getting the stack off the computer for 5/10 sessions is a huge advantage. The bigfoot forums can speak to wtf a stack is and the actual directx calls.
Which is essential for avoiding seeing characters getting lots of exercise against walls, essentially since connectiving updates are async for players, lag will always be an issue and the game is very very low bandwidth (modem speed, minus zoning). People around you will be sending updates (i moved xyz, i moved xyz, i moved xyz) and you will get them late. The card can pull the messages and requeue them as a (i moved {xyz,xyz,xyz}). This is huge for removing run against a wall exercise sessions.
In this, blizzard's data is getting processed by you faster, but as the above posted not to you faster.
I get way more performance out of the killer than my ssd, having a 64mb buffer 10k drive works just fine for a ./Data volume for zoning speeds 10boxing.
I'm looking forward to using one of these as I tend to do a lot of things online at the same time. Steam voice chat in particular seems to turn terrible at the drop of a hat/packet.
I ordered one, I wont be surprised if its terrible but but its worth a shot - maybe it actually will make gameplay abit smoother. Its way cheaper and probably offers more then my hifi speaker cables :)
I've heard extremely mixed reviews on the Killer NICs, I've always been tempted to get one, but always wind up spending money on something else.
The box showed some signs of having been opened, some of the packaging was torn and the driver cd had some scratches on it. I just installed the card into a free pci-e x16 slot and then installed the drivers and the card is working :)
I've got the better of the initial two cards they released.
It's probably not remotely close to their current cards, being 4 or 5 years old now.
Have not really noticed a huge difference from it.
It's the case of.. if you want the best system and are paying a premium, get this too.
Even if the benefit isn't that huge, it is a benefit of sorts.
So I thought.. why not.