The "Killa" NIC makes a comeback????

I told you that comparing oranges and apples was boring, and yet you persist:rolleyes:

you can't really be using the compiling apps for the nic argument.

this is supposed to be a gaming nic right? therefore that has nothing to do with gaming :p the rest I can agree on.
 
you can't really be using the compiling apps for the nic argument.

Yes I can when it is a feature of the card :rolleyes:

this is supposed to be a gaming nic right? therefore that has nothing to do with gaming :p the rest I can agree on.

You GPU is geared for gaming so decoding video is nothing?

You are confusing the K1 with the M1...do read up.
 
I never said I was unable to find the specs...in fact I hadn't bothered looking.

The stop posting..waste of time.

While you're at it, why don't you make a producive post and show off some useful apps that NIC can run?

Nah, I am stopping in this post, no matter what I post, some uninformed poster is just going to mocve the goalpost.
Or some uninformed person is just going to post fallacies.
Or some uninformed person is going to post lies.
Key word: Uninformed.

Enjoy your onboard crap :)
 
I can compile apps and run them from the router?

Seriously - there is [H]ard and then there is just rediculous. A NIC that runs apps...while it may be available that's great but useful to more than maybe a couple of people with specific needs it isn't. The overhead of a NIC on a modern CPU with 4 cores is probably less than 1/10th of a percent (yes I pulled that number from ether).

It's great you like it and thanks for sharing but no one that *just* plays games needs that thing.
 
Enjoy your onboard crap :)

I will. :D

I certainly agree with Dan_D about onboard being 'good enough' for 99.9% of the population. I am pleased with the performance of my NIC. However, before my current router (D-Link DIR655) I would have loved a Killer NIC, but this router does an impeccable job at giving me NO LAG in servers, excellent file transfer speed, even while running BitTorrent (granted it was about the same cost - excellent purchase in my book).

Now, please lay off the kool-aid. You don't know when to stop, and it's super irritating. :(
 
It's great you like it and thanks for sharing but no one that *just* plays games needs that thing.

Exactly. If this thing wasn't marketed at the hardcore gamer crowd, and didn't have a fairly ridiculous price, AND there wasn't other hardware out there that does ~95% of the same duty at a fraction of the cost, I don't think a lot of us would have much to say other than "cool nic" :p


edit:

So does the latest iteration actually do TCP offloading, or is it still UDP only? Does it do any stateful packet inspection and QOS that you can control, or is it all "magic drivers". Seriously curious here.
 
It's too bad they didn't put more effort into the sound. It might almost be worth the $ (or even a bit more) it it had top notch sound too if you're running multiple video cards. SLI/X-fire has this nasty habit of causing slot shortages, so the extra $ might be worth it to get sound and NIC upgrades while using only one slot.

Of course what I'd really like is a "Killer I/O Board" with everything I want that a typical mainboard doesn't come with crammed onto a single PCI-e 8x board: Gigabit (or better) high quality NIC, top quality 7.1 sound, TV-in, maybe a SAS/SATA raid controller w/ hardware raid 5, 1, 0, etc. support, etc.
 
It's too bad they didn't put more effort into the sound. It might almost be worth the $ (or even a bit more) it it had top notch sound too if you're running multiple video cards. SLI/X-fire has this nasty habit of causing slot shortages, so the extra $ might be worth it to get sound and NIC upgrades while using only one slot.

Of course what I'd really like is a "Killer I/O Board" with everything I want that a typical mainboard doesn't come with crammed onto a single PCI-e 8x board: Gigabit (or better) high quality NIC, top quality 7.1 sound, TV-in, maybe a SAS/SATA raid controller w/ hardware raid 5, 1, 0, etc. support, etc.

Just buy a good sound card and use the onboard NIC :eek:
 
Yes I can when it is a feature of the card :rolleyes:



You GPU is geared for gaming so decoding video is nothing?

You are confusing the K1 with the M1...do read up.


Killer NIC™ M1 Gaming Network Card
Killer NIC™ K1 Gaming Network Card

you are arguing the usefulness of a feature, that 99.9% of gamers won't touch. So, feature or not, it's useless to its targeted consumers.

this card is aimed at gamers, if you really wanted the cpu/os to be useful, have it use 2 ports so that you can run it as a router and connect it to a switch :p

as far as it's usefulness to other people who knows, useless for someone who already uses linux/unix box I guess :p
 
The card is over designed and has features that its target market won't use. If you can make use of those features, well more power to you. For my money, I'll grab an Intel Pro 1000PT or other server NIC if I find the onboard performance lacking.
 
This nic looks neat... 99.9999% of the world will not find a use for this. It is over priced for its capabilites
 
BS, a "top end" mobo now clears the 400 buck mark, this thing is a rip off, but isn't as bad as a top end board.

You can get a brand new Maximus 2 Formula for $200. I can't really think of any desktop board other than an x58 that costs much more than that. A Gigabyte UD3P costs $135 and I would definetly consider it a top end board. So, how is that BS?
 
The stop posting..waste of time.



Nah, I am stopping in this post, no matter what I post, some uninformed poster is just going to mocve the goalpost.
Or some uninformed person is just going to post fallacies.
Or some uninformed person is going to post lies.
Key word: Uninformed.

Enjoy your onboard crap :)

According to your sig, you have an 8800gt. Don't you think that that money would be better spent on a better video card or more ram? What will this do for me that my onboard nic can't? Offload my network data? Ha, I'm sure that my Q9650 at 4ghz is really bottlenecking my nic. Do you have a physix card, too? Oh, you do. What a surprise. ;)
 
Not being able to run Vent would be killer for me. I'd love to be able to bypass Vista 64 and not have to deal with some weird sound issues from time to time when playing Warhammer. Also, if there was an app like Winamp that ran in that card and let you stream music that might perk my interest. Sure there are cheaper alternatives but having something right there isn't a bad idea.
 
According to your sig, you have an 8800gt. Don't you think that that money would be better spent on a better video card or more ram? What will this do for me that my onboard nic can't? Offload my network data? Ha, I'm sure that my Q9650 at 4ghz is really bottlenecking my nic. Do you have a physix card, too? Oh, you do. What a surprise. ;)


No use arguing with him, He will tell you until the day he dies, why a Physics card and KILLER M1,K1, F1, Z1, or any other killer nic card that, they are that much better over everything else.

This is how bad companies stay around, they fool people with marketing :(
 
According to your sig, you have an 8800gt. Don't you think that that money would be better spent on a better video card or more ram? What will this do for me that my onboard nic can't? Offload my network data? Ha, I'm sure that my Q9650 at 4ghz is really bottlenecking my nic. Do you have a physix card, too? Oh, you do. What a surprise. ;)

I have 4 GB, no games uses that.
I use a 21" crt, so the 8800 is fine.

Actually I would totally waste my money on more RAM or a new GPU.
 
If had the money to Thr0w away I would just to see "what if" but in all of my searches I have yet to find any real reason to buy it.
 
This nic looks neat... 99.9999% of the world will not find a use for this. It is over priced for its capabilites

The Killer cards are overpriced in general (I think $80 would be reasonable for the hardware and software support they provide) but evga should be cut some slack. Their NIC is an update significantly more powerful than the older cards and probably less liable to break on newer hardware and it costs less than the other cards.

As much as people like to hate on the cards they did offer a performance boost in reducing latency and FPS. The opportunity cost wasn't justified with the older cards but spending $130 for the NIC as opposed to spending $230 on a graphics card instead of $100 is a more debatable point.


People who keep mentioning this isn't useful for gamers are exaggerating when they claim gamers only play games, as if they don't use anything else that can strain their gaming performance, like fraps or torrents.
 
No semi-serious gamer torrents while playing online games if they can help it. And so much for letting this thread die...
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
 
Fun fact: most of the latency on a LAN is due to the network stack of any OS that handles the traffic, primarily those which operate on the actual package data (like when using a usermode utility like ping or tracert).

Take this ping using the (recommended) hrping utility for example:
Pinging 10.0.0.10
with 64 bytes data (92 bytes IP):

Reply from 10.0.0.10: seq=0000 time=0.411ms TTL=64 ID=bbe8
Reply from 10.0.0.10: seq=0001 time=0.209ms TTL=64 ID=bbe9
Reply from 10.0.0.10: seq=0002 time=0.196ms TTL=64 ID=bbea
Reply from 10.0.0.10: seq=0003 time=0.206ms TTL=64 ID=bbeb
This a PC <-> switch <-> PC connection. The latency induced by the Cat-5e wiring itself measures in nanoseconds. 255 us latency is what we end up with while using onboard NICs and a cheap Cisco switch.

For a cluster 255 us can be an eternity if the processes itself execute in nanoseconds. Say that the average cluster task takes 100 ns to execute, after that it has to wait 2,550 times that period for it to sync up with the central node. If we look at Myrinet ( http://www.myri.com/myrinet/overview/ ) for example, we can reach latencies of 2-3 us, reducing the sync time a hundred times, thus allowing many more execution cycles.

What I'm trying to show here is that reducing latency can have a very significant effect in certain situations, and a networked game can be an example of it. What the effect of this special NIC is, I'm not sure, but I would love to see what it could do on a LAN or a cluster.
 
I've been eyeing up the Killer K1 for a while already. May only shave a few miliseconds but I'm still a big fan of FPS games and during LAN games I'll take any edge I can get. lol... and I have a bit of cash to burn.
 
Seems like alot of hype, and not much support in the gaming community. Price has to be the big reason. Why so much for just a NIC. Even some cheap Mobos have dual NICs now. I want to see real proof and support from some honest pro gamers that are not just looking for sponsorship $$$.
 
Seems like alot of hype, and not much support in the gaming community. Price has to be the big reason. Why so much for just a NIC. Even some cheap Mobos have dual NICs now. I want to see real proof and support from some honest pro gamers that are not just looking for sponsorship $$$.

You can have 80 nics on your motherboard, if they all suck, they all suck ;)
 
When your fps is already in the triple digits, why does the extra 5 fps matter? It serves no purpose. Neither does a reduction of 5ms when your ping is in the 50-60s, it's going to jump up and down, being totally dependent on your ISP's routing and the server that's hosting the game.

I understand that you and a lot of others think that a 5-10ms ping difference doesn't make a difference, but in some games it does.

I play Quakeworld, in fact, I'm the only person who posts on the [H] who does, so maybe I'm part of a very tiny niche, but in this game the difference between 30 ping and 40 ping is extremely noticeable and will affect your gameplay tremendously. If this device can lower my pings 10ms for $129, I'll gladly pay it.
 
I understand that you and a lot of others think that a 5-10ms ping difference doesn't make a difference, but in some games it does.

I play Quakeworld, in fact, I'm the only person who posts on the [H] who does, so maybe I'm part of a very tiny niche, but in this game the difference between 30 ping and 40 ping is extremely noticeable and will affect your gameplay tremendously.

Maybe it's because the code is 12 years old?
 
Is there seriously ANY rational benefit to having an external NIC Card? I've always used the one on my MOBO.
 
Is there seriously ANY rational benefit to having an external NIC Card? I've always used the one on my MOBO.

Kinda ignorant, no? There is a million reasons, just read through this thread. Just not one real rational reason for this specific card.
 
Kinda ignorant, no? There is a million reasons, just read through this thread. Just not one real rational reason for this specific card.

Yes, I'm ignorant about network cards, thus why I asked, instead of having to piecemeal 20 threads together for a collective list.

Excuse me for using common sense.
 
Is there seriously ANY rational benefit to having an external NIC Card? I've always used the one on my MOBO.

PCI(e) NICs generally off-load more processing to the NIC instead of using the CPU for it (which Realtek and Broadcom NICs do, among others). This can save you a fair amount of CPU <-> NIC traffic and thus latency.
 
Maybe it's because the code is 12 years old?

Yes this has a lot to do with it. The netcode is quite old so ping makes a very large difference. Anyway, while in some games 10ms might not make a difference, in others it can, so even a 5-10ms drop is welcome and I would gladly pay for it.
 
PCI(e) NICs generally off-load more processing to the NIC instead of using the CPU for it (which Realtek and Broadcom NICs do, among others). This can save you a fair amount of CPU <-> NIC traffic and thus latency.

You know what's awesome?

It took you just as long to answer my noobie question then it would have to pull a criccio.

Thanks, Elledan. That made perfect sense to me now.
 
I've been reading up on NIC cards since my last reply and I'm seriously stumped as to why anyone would (using cost v.s. reward) gain something from one of these cards at the prices they sell at.

Maybe it's like spinners on cars... it doesn't actually "do" anything new for your car; it just shows it off.

Well thanks for that.:p

That's a much better response than your original comment. ;)
 
You know what's awesome?

It took you just as long to answer my noobie question then it would have to pull a criccio.

Thanks, Elledan. That made perfect sense to me now.

You're most welcome :)

If all you care about is lower latency, then a real hardware NIC (see battle between HW and SW (Windows) modems as well) might be all you need. This 'Killa' NIC is more than just a simple HW NIC and thus should be regarded in that light. Don't need the sound features and self-contained nature of it? Then just get a good Intel NIC or so :)
 
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