New Killernic K1

[Cinrellik]

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2037169,00.asp

"Honestly, there's just no way we can recommend the Killer NIC. It's an incredibly interesting idea, and it makes academic sense, but we're just not seeing the benefit. Even if it worked really well and we saw big benefits, you have to ask yourself if you would be better spending $279 on other computer components that would benefit every game you play and even other general tasks.

A gaming mouse charges a premium price—maybe $60 instead of the $40 you spend for a good general purpose desktop mouse. The same goes for other gaming hardware. Unfortunately, the Killer NIC is competing with free. Everyone has a NIC integrated into their motherboard, and asking them to give up a precious PCI slot and almost $300 for a card that only slightly improves performance only some of the time—that's just insanity. The right price is more like $99, and that's assuming it delivered better results, more often. "

1) The K1 is an attempt at bringing the price down. $149 instead of the original M1 $279 MSRP (although we've gotten that down to $249 now as well)

2) We've also continued FNA development. FNA Firewall is released, and FNA Bit Torrent is now avaliable for beta testing. With more FNA applications capable of running on the network card instead of tieing up CPU time, we are trying to tie in more value on top of the gameing performance benifits.

3) My interests here aren't really to debate price points. Even the article you quoted does not deny its function. All I want is for people to know we do what we claim. We do improve performance. I just don't want false information spread, or flames talking about how we are a fake product that doesn't do anything. Whether or not that is worth the price, is for customers to decide.

and you may want your friend "tomstomper" to calm down too

You pour 2 years of your life into creating new technology and than see if you can stay calm while people flame you without even making an attempt to understand what you've created.

[Cinrellik]

aditionally the card does not support pci-e there would more demand if it supported pci-e 1x slot as they are on alot of systms but largely unused

It would add additional cost for no additional benifits. I'm not saying we won't make one. It just isn't cost effective to produce right now. It's hard enough showing off our technology at the current price points.

Would like to see hexus do a review of this card.

Nox

Working on it.

[MadduckUK]

stop using dollars, you wont have noticed since you probably googled for "killer k1" and then started hopping on what came up. but this is a UK site.

You pour 2 years of your life into creating new technology and than see if you can stay calm while people flame you without even making an attempt to understand what you've created.

so do they employ you to do this now or do you still have an actual job?

[Nox]

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2037169,00.asp

Reading the whole conclusion you linked, it is also stated it can improve your gaming performance?

I've still yet to see a completely negative recent review about this card. (bar the price)

Nox

[alsenior]

okay i looked at the reviews and i have some doubts over the tests in these reviews. these are :

mmorpg.org review - not a well carried out test. the reviewer adtmitted this much themselves

hardocp.com review - i have doubts over the independence of as the test was done at bigfoots labs themselves rather than independently

pcper.com - how can i trust this the graphs were not done properly and seamed to be confused as to what they meant.

to be truthful i would much rather the test be done by hexus or toms hardware or xyz computing as they are the few sites i trust. only then would i accept your claims

[MadduckUK]

it got 4/10, id say thats pretty low. id love to see Hexus do a review, get some PCI NIC cards involved aswell.. at the same time Apoptosis over at legitreviews.com is still waiting for his cards

We would have had a review a long time ago, but Killer cut our sample after we published this article: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/358/1/ Promptly after I posted that article no one at Killer would contact me and even Harlan Beverly wouldn't return my messages. I found it odd that they let me post the very first pictures of the card and then never send a card when they said they would.

Just a few weeks ago I bumped into KillerNIC in the bar line at a PC Charity Race in Las Vegas during CES and thanked the guy for never responding to us (Legit Reviews). After that awkward moment, I was promised the card and started getting contacted by KillerNIC again. I had a conference call with them last week on the K1/M1 and was told I was going to be sent both.

They were supposed to send a sample out last week, but I have yet to get any cards or even a tracking number... Two promises of review samples and no products yet...

alsenior: your right about the reviews too. the hardocp one especially as i would usually trust them however it appears they were forced into "controlled conditions"

[kempez]

I think we should stop the flaming until we see a proper independent and well carried out UK review

Don't you?

[Agent]

Yes
Cinrellik has been professional in all his replys - I have doubts too, I admit, but untill I see proof from a site I trust (either in favour, or against), its not fair to make judgement on a product none of us have ever used.

Remember what people said when the orignal Core2Duo benchmarks come out? Intel were called everything under the sun for "faking" the benchmarks. Now if you want a performace based system, AMD isnt even a choice.

[MadduckUK]

well "flame" is a bit strong, but your right. its getting late so ill leave this to fester

mm.. i thaught everyone knew it was going to be a bunch faster than the pentium M's which were already scaring AMD

anyways....

[Cinrellik]

stop using dollars, you wont have noticed since you probably googled for "killer k1" and then started hopping on what came up. but this is a UK site.

I noticed

But:

1) I don't know what stores in your area are charging. Retail sites can mark up prices if they wish, outside of setting the MSRP (manufacturers SUGGESTED retail price), we have no direct control of an individual stores final price decisions. Less so when it comes to international sales as they may need to mark up to cover import fees.

2) I'm not really here to debate prices anyway. I can't tell you what you should or shouldn't pay for PC parts. I won't deny we are expensive when compared to other NIC's.

This site has been considerably more polite than some I've visited. What I normally encounter are people spewing false data, lieing about reviews or making completely false claims such as the Killer is only useful for hacking (which it's not).

I want to clear up misconceptions, point people to real reviews, answer peoples questions and in cases like Hexus: get them a card to review if they want one (and yes, we're working on it).

Whether or not you as an individual buy one (or whether I quote the right price for your area), isn't as important to me as making sure you have all the information you need to make the decision thats right for you.

You obviously have some slight interest in what the Killer does, or you'd simply be ignoring this thread all together.

so do they employ you to do this now or do you still have an actual job?

My visiting message boards is just me spending a few minutes a day browsing the web in my down time.

My actual job here is QA manager(Quality Assurance and testing). This covers a wide range of things, some days I'm checking NIC's from the manufacturer to ensure they are packaged correctly and functional. Other days I am performance testing our latest driver release to ensure we didn't break anything, or to double check that the latest fixes were rolled into the final version release.

I'm also the person that is tasked with duplicating bug reports. So when someone calls tech support with an issue that does't already have a fix, I have to track down why it's happening and replicate that for the engineers so they can see what needs to be fixed.

Or the really fun days are performance comparison checks, running PC's with Killer vs PC's without Killer and tracking the results.

Everyone here is a gamer, but more so than anyone else, it's my JOB to be a gamer, and constantly evaluate Killer and its benifits.

So, if I get a bit over zealous in my replys, it's not marketing spew. I didn't even know about Killer before I was hired. My first time with a Killer in a PC, I wasn't even told it was there and I could feel the differance. I was just told to play, and give my opinion of what the computer felt like. Than I moved over to another identical computer and evaluated the differance.

I've worked in online gaming for years (at places like sony, and other companys). Litteraly thousands of hours online (I could show you characters with 10,000+ hours on them in MMORPGs). Countless hours both on the job and off the clock from the last 30 years I've spent playing games.

I don't blindly believe in any product. I support Killer because I know it works. Because all of my experience in online gameing lets me evaluate it as a gamer and I'm not the kind of person that falls for gimmicks or placebo effects.

You've got me rambling; and yes, I know you'll take 99% of what I say with a grain of salt simply because of where my paychecks come from. But this is simply who I am, and how I deal with people who question that.

okay i looked at the reviews and i have some doubts over the tests in these reviews. these are :

mmorpg.org review - not a well carried out test. the reviewer adtmitted this much themselves

hardocp.com review - i have doubts over the independence of as the test was done at bigfoots labs themselves rather than independently

pcper.com - how can i trust this the graphs were not done properly and seamed to be confused as to what they meant.

to be truthful i would much rather the test be done by hexus or toms hardware or xyz computing as they are the few sites i trust. only then would i accept your claims

MMORPG may not be a scientific test, but we don't tell reviewers how to do the testing. Honestly, I think the feel of the connection is what is improved the most, and visually seeing performance improvements speak volumes more than any numbers ever could.

Even where ping and FPS are not measurably improved there is still other kinds of performance benifits. Having less ping spikes, less stutter, smoother transitions between frames, the removal of the pause BETWEEN pings by replacing the windows network stack, none of this shows up in graphs or charts. These are tactile and visual improvements. Ping and FPS tracked improvements are side effects when they exist.

Hard OCP chose to come to our offices because they are local. They wanted to see how we do our own testing and than replicate that with people that did not work here.

Not only did their testing simulate ours with independant reviewers, but most of it was done without telling those reviewers which machines had a Killer.

Reviewers were allowed to bring their own mouse/keyboard, anything they needed/wanted to play their best and all of the review data was collected by their reporter in a closed conferance room that we were not a part of.

Beyond teaching someone how to set up a Killer (if they need it) or explaining our own test methods (if they are interested), reviewers are essentially free to do whatever test methods they wish.

alsenior: your right about the reviews too. the hardocp one especially as i would usually trust them however it appears they were forced into "controlled conditions"

I wouldn't call something they requested "forced".

it got 4/10, id say thats pretty low. id love to see Hexus do a review, get some PCI NIC cards involved aswell.. at the same time Apoptosis over at legitreviews.com is still waiting for his cards

I personally hadn't heard of legit reviews until recently. And I've never been responsible for sending out review cards so I can't explain offhand why there is a delay. I can tell you that I will personally look into it and find out what's going on.

I want both Hexus and Legit reviews to get NIC's to review. I will try to make that happen, or at least tell you what happend.

The only reviewers I've seen turned down were people we could not verify as official reviewers for thier claimed sites, or basically people trying to get free cards without some measure of security. (I'm not saying thats the case with hexus or legit, I don't know yet)

As for testing Killer vs other PCI NIC cards, it's been done. I can't point to a review that's actually bothered to mention it (so please feel free to find an independant reviewer to do it again). But I can say that in my own testing, a PCI NIC card isn't skipping the windows network stack, it isn't priority UDP, and since it doesn't have it's own linux processor, it's still using the CPU for its computations and not freeing up CPU power. So a PCI NIC compared to onboard is generally no improvement at all, or in some cases worse if the onboard is well integrated. The only PCI NIC's that come close to making improvements are server class, and only if they can be configured to priority UDP isntead of TCP; and not only do they not give the same degree of improvement as I've seen with Killer, but good server class NICs run several hundred dollars more than ours. (server class NICs are intended to speed web browsing, and downloading and do a wonderful job at this, they simply have never been designed for gaming which uses differant protocols and data delivery methods) I honestly want a server edition of Killer someday, though it would be targeted at companys that run game servers, not consumers.

[nichomach]

Firstly, I think cinrellik should be complimented upon being absolutely upfront about his affiliation; we've all seen the cases where a manufacturer or vendor employee has got into these sorts of discussion without mentioning the fact that they are employed by the manufacturer or vendor of the product under discussion. Secondly, he's quite right to note that whether you're prepared to pay the premium for this device is not his decision to make, and has also stated clearly that it's up to the purchaser to decide. I look forward to (hopefully) a Hexus review; I doubt I'd ever get one of these (frankly, I have bigger problems with my gameplay than lag... ; as the [H] said, "Most of you will likely not find value in this product, but some of you certainly will." - I'm in the "most" category...), but it'd be interesting to read, and I do like to see innovation in unexpected areas. With regard to the mentions of server NICs above, until manufacturers started building TCP Offload Engines in, it was largely assumed that as long as it was a good quality server card, it'd perform pretty much identically to any other also.

Anyway, I look forward to the review.

[Kumagoro]

How well this Killer NIC works I have no idea.

I think that the product is likely to be bought by people who have the money to buy the best of everything.

If you are willing to splash out on two top end graphics cards, low latency ram, PPU etc then the price of the killer nic isnt something that would put you off.

[Cinrellik]

I asked our marketing director today and was told "David from Hexus has a card already in the mail and should recieve it within a couple of days."

I don't know which one of you is "David" ?

[alsenior]

david is the one called david on the forums

[Funkstar]

David = DR = owner of Hexus

[Nox]

david is the one called david on the forums

lol

its late, been a long day, thats bang on my 2am sense of humour.

Nox