Killer NIC : gaming Network Card

[listy]

anyone brave enough to admit that they have one?

my mate has one he has more money than brains tbh

he says it helps a little in some games

but alot of time works in my favor hes giving me his old fx60 that he payed 299.99 about 6months ago
and a 1950pro

[Zak33]

but listy...can you take it out of his rig, plug him into a standard Network card (onbaord maybe?) and restest some games....nting the Ping and the lag?

To compare?

[0iD]

Well I think you should buy one, in the interests of science.

[Mike Fishcake]

snake oil until a hexus review shows otherwise

Exactly the phrase I was thinking.

And Custom PC compared it to an integrated network controller, but didn't seem to compare it to a standard add-on PCI NIC. How much of the bandwidth was actually improved by the "on-board computer" I wonder?

Also, how much better performance would you get by spending an additional £180 on a graphics card instead?

Throw this one into the pile with Infinium Labs and Phorm for marketing bull

[finnrogers]

Ok so the benefits are small(ish), and the bang for buck is poor. Does that mean there is no market for it? No. As evidenced by listy, those with more money than sense will buy this sort of thing - partly for gloating, partly for performance.

There are hundreds of examples of these kind of niche products on the market. I mean who needs DDR3 memory that's been pre-overclocked to 2Ghz and above, costing more than 3 or 4 times the price of normal DDR3?

[da.Guvna]

I like the shiny heatsink

[Agent]

I like the shiny heatsink

Chav?

Your ISP is far more important to latency

[Jay]

i you torrnet and play online FPS or other latency dependant games then its got to be worth it to you.

If you are like the other 99.99999% of us who either don't torrent or only do so at night or when not needing the internet for gaming then I doubt there is any point.

I rate CustomPC very very highly, so much so that It was the first and only mag I subscribe to. There review was very good and if they thought it didn't do what it was suposed to they would have said. Don't think that Hexus is the only place that you can trust.

[Funkstar]

And what about your router?

With torrent apps opening up dozens of connections, the NAT software in your router gets hammered. A killer NIC and a cheap ass ADSL router seems like a complete waste to me. They don't even mension what they connected it to in that review.

[Jay]

I would think right to the modem.

You can ask them on their forums, they are quite active.

[directhex]

Exactly the phrase I was thinking.

And Custom PC compared it to an integrated network controller, but didn't seem to compare it to a standard add-on PCI NIC. How much of the bandwidth was actually improved by the "on-board computer" I wonder?

Also, how much better performance would you get by spending an additional £180 on a graphics card instead?

Throw this one into the pile with Infinium Labs and Phorm for marketing bull

there are only so many companies making network silicon though. a broadcom or marvell chip won't be any faster if it's on an expansion card rather than a motherboard. are some chips better than others? sure. but comparing to onboard is perfectly reasonable

perhaps it would be an interesting benchmark to compare common onboard chips (e.g. marvell yukon, broadcom netextreme, realtek 8169) with plug-in options (e.g. intel 1000) or even "classic" 10/100 cards like a 3com 905