Killer Xeno Pro - my experience

[Pycno]

Just thought I could share some of my experiences with Bigfoot network cards.

I tried a Killer K1 some years ago and it refused to work properly on the computers I tested it in and one even needed a reinstall of Windows after booting with the card inserted. It really messed up the computers and I could not get it to work properly on any of the 3 computers I had at the time.

That was years ago and I figured maybe something had improved since then, I bought a Killer Xeno Pro networks card to see if there was anything to gain from a supposedly high end network card. Even if its a small upgrade its not silly for a high end computer with nothing else to upgrade, provided it works and provides a performance gain of some kind.


After having installed the card the first problem i noticed was that the card does not work when booting up - it requires either a reflash of the firmware (takes 5 minutes) or a restart of the computer before it detects a connection. I didnt care so much for this as Im rarely in a rush to boot my PC up but its still inconvenient and annoying.

The more serious problem with the card is that its unreliable and the connection drops out for short periods of time, it seems to happen at random and can happen during browsing or gaming.
Getting disconnected on five toons and having to relog them all with a single authenticator gets tedious in the long run.

Im not joking at all, I upgraded from Killer Xeno Pro to my onboard nic and everything seems faster and I havent had a single hickup or disconnect since.

If you are considering buying one then take a good hard read at their tech support forums first, serious issues that are several months old with no sign of any fix or patch coming to the rescue.

In short: my onboard NIC (gigabit) outperforms the killer card and is also stable & reliable

[Kicksome]

lol, damn. I was wondering if those things were actually worth it.

[Harrypott]

Had wondered about these cards in the past too. Thanks for the info

[Sam DeathWalker]

I have a big review of their product at my web site.

[daviddoran]

I saw a youtube review of that, side by side with a PCIe gigabit card, and the PCIe was faster. I think a server grade NIC would be about the only sort of network card upgrade worth anything, and with more and more motherboards including not one, but 2 onboard gigabit NICs, I dont see much of a point.

One of the few things that made it different was that it was supposed to be running some sort of embedded linux, and u could attach a usb drive to it, and do file sharing while gaming, without hindering the games performance. But that was when internet speeds werent close to what we have available today, and computers themselves are so much faster that the "overhead" of onboard NICs isnt an issue. I think back when CPUs were much slower, 1% overhead was a noticable difference, but with 6 core processors becoming main stream, I see less need for dedicated processing units other than GPUs.