We've all heard about Gigabit. Yes, its nice and I am still in the process of upgrading as per a previous thread.

But I just stumbled on this. £180 for a gaming Gigabit card that optimises network traffic for games. Is it really going to be any different at all compared to the £8 DLink special. (guess which one I plan on buying)

KillerNIC M1 Gigabit Desktop PCI Network Adapter

 

I was all ready to slag that thing off until I read it is effectively a 400Mhz CPU with 64Mb running a Linux kernel.

For die-hard, want-to-every-last-frame-I-can types... well... yeah. Plus you can torrent straight to a connected USB drive without touching your p.c. resources.

Not for me... but if you really want to get the hit box where you expect it to be, it may be a good idea.

 

I just imagine the types of people who would actually buy this are mostly going to only notice a downgrade in performance. Most probably from the fact that the drivers are mostly likely not going to be compatible with all the new games. If the thing does not catch on, then drivers will not be updated enough.

Which is pretty much what is happening to my hardware encoding non creative soundcard. Rubbish in games with all sorts of audio issues simply down to the drivers

 

I think it was Custom PC who reviewed this a month or 2 back and it made a noticeable difference to frame rates in all the games they benchmarked. Still a lot of money tho

 

Oh wow, well I stand correctly. I really thought it would make **** all difference. Especially to frame rates for games. I assume the test PC was at least dual core. You would not expect a simple little network card to make a huge different to overall frame rates.

 

I read that but I think it was if you were doing other stuff like torrent in the background as well but I may have been mistaken as I only skimmed it.
Having spent 300 quid on my last PC, no way I'd entertain 180 for a NIC!!!

 

Yes, 180 for a NIC does seem very expensive. So expensive you could have a spare PC doing the downloading

 

The article is here

Killer NIC – First look | News | Custom PC

 

Wow, that is an impressive piece of kit after all. If it catches on MS is going to be really embarrassed at just how crap Windows is when it comes to networking. I just cannot believe that after all these years of development, a little card like that can make so much difference to the performance of dual core machines.

Poor show for Windows once again. Shame we cannot run games on something else to start with

 

I note they compare it to a integrated Realtek NIC - I wonder how it compares to a PCI NIC from say Intel?

I wonder if a TCP/IP offload engine would make any difference? Shame XP doesn't support them though (AFAIK).