KillerNIC...uh, okay

Big B

Big B

HWF Godfather
KillerNIC

It's missing 1 thing: the Fatal1ty branding.
64MB of RAM...sure, some buffering might help, but 64MB of DDR? Why?
Especially in these days where decent NICs are integrated on motherboards, why would you want a NIC, let alone some overly bling'd NIC? It's a network card! Why must there be an attempt to pimp out a network card?
 
Well I've never seen anything like it, I'll give it that much. What I want to know is, can anyone really tell a difference gaming with that versus an onboard ethernet device. I almost want to email that page to Tom's Hardware and see if they'd take it for a rip.
 
As big of douchebags as THG is, it wouldn't surprise me. They'd probably pit it against a 10Mbps NIC to show how 'awesomely 1337' it is. KillerNIC---brought to you by the same people that tune up Civics for racing.
 
Heh I agree about THG.

Seems quite gimicky, and the Game First feature is already available in nVidia's nForce 500 series chipsets. "Offloads processing off your CPU so you get higher FPS!!!!!!1", didn't we see that in the PhysX?
 
Ummm, what is the point of the Killer NIC? how is it going to give you an advantage when gaming, is it just a network card?, the worlds most powerfull network card?
 
It's called marketing to bozos with more money than brains. I'm not saying it won't work or that it might not be cool to have, but most people aren't going to give a damn about the NIC. Secondly, the quality of the lines you have coming to your place for broadband can affect your speeds. In these cases, the onboard NIC and the $300 GbE NIC aren't going to get around it. I'm curious to see what AT thinks, but I have a feeling that he's going to see it like it is.
 
Big B said:
...I'm curious to see what AT thinks, but I have a feeling that he's going to see it like it is.
Click to expand...
A Nic with integrated DDR... :O Wow, what a marketing device. "When other gamers complain that your ping is too low, adjust it a little higher until they stop whining. Then, dial it back down and go in for the kill!"

Hahahaha, classic! So, with this magical network adapter, none of those niggling things like, oh, say geographical distance, bogged down network nodes along your route, and the network stack of your OS will get in the way of your 1337 ping... as if ping times were the only thing a gamer must worry about. I had really decent ping over dialup, around 50ms on most HL servers back in the day. You know what? Dialup still sucked. This product stinks of gimmick, especially since if your network card has to buffer 64mb of data, your latency is already crazy high. Might as well just mail your friends the packets.

P.S. > Come to think about it, adding RAM to a NIC would probably add latency, not improve it. After all, now you have to worry about the timing of your system bus and the timing of your sweet NIC's integrated RAM. The only thing that would make such an awesome NIC better would be to slap some heatsyncs on the RAM and water-cool the NPU! Yeah! And add some blue cathode lighting!
 
Hmm, I just had an epiphany. What if the thing needs that 64mb of RAM to run its own OS? Like maybe a stripped-down version of BSD. Then you might be able to actually bypass the, um, defective Windows network stack. That might actually shave off a few ms of network latency.

My first points still stands though that network latency along the WAN route will be much more detrimental to gaming than anything else. I mean, geez, my network latency is around ~0.097ms on my LAN. Both ends of the echo request run Linux, all my cables are to spec, and my switch is a Netgear GS108. On Windows, I might get ~2.0ms on the same network. But I don't care who you are, I don't think 2MS is going to make or break your gameplay. It's the other ~98ms of latency you pick up on the way to the game servers that will get you!
 
If that card is running it's own OS, yeah, 64MB would be valid, but I didn't see anything on the 'specs' PDF about that. Right now, it looks like the X-RAM on the X-Fi sound cards: all show.
 
Maybe they have just invented it for computers in Boy Racers cars lol, to make the computer go with the car maybe lol :p, does it work over wireless?
 
You mean, so they can have some 1337 g4m1ng 4ct10n on their riced out Civic?

KillerNIC looks like a wired only connection.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top