Bigfoot Launches 'Fastest NIC Ever' Killer 2100

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NPU? Give me a break. Every chip can be a "processing unit" if you really want it to be. But this card is so racy, I'm surprised it doesn't come with it's own water cooling solution.
 
Marketing hype. Unbelievable. This card would offer zero gain for 99% of gamers out there. I suppose if you were using an on-board nic that is older, and plugged into a heavy traffic multicast network for some reason, this would be helpful. Beyond that though.. not gonna help gaming. Now, I DO wonder what this little ah heck would be capable of in packets per second / multiple heavy transfers etc. Seems like a better server idea than gaming system one.
 
[citation][nom]nforce4max[/nom]This NIC is a white elephant and for the price it won't sell that well except to those who got more money than sense. I rather buy more hard drives than this.[/citation]

Sort of like those Fatal1ty branded items. Take a 99 dollar sound card, wrap it in a metal case and tack on 50 bucks.

Spend the money that you were gong to spend on this on buying a faster internet connection or a better video card.
 
[citation][nom]mavroxur[/nom]It seems that many people don't understand the benefit of having a hardware engine processing the TCP stack. While I have to agree, for the average user doing gaming / light file transfers, the benefits are negligible, under heavy throughput, there is a considerable difference.And i'm for one glad they got rid of that gaudy "K" heatsink. Looked like some kids toy.[/citation]

The thing I think youre missing is that they are selling it to gamers... not enterprise admins. Sure you need multiple high speed nics in a data center server... not in your dell at home playing counter strike. This is essentially an enterprise level piece of equipment being sold to the consumer market as "the fastest nic ever!!1!" and in reality your gigabit nic on your mobo isnt the issue with your lack of skills.
 
[citation][nom]arcainumbro[/nom]For internet gaming, this would be a complete waste of money. I could potentially see it paying off at a LAN party where you are playing off a dedicated server on the same network. Could be a slight improvement/advantage there.[/citation]

yeah cause your cheapie onboard nic giving you a 5ms ping at a lan is such a drag right?
 
[citation][nom]drowned[/nom]You have no clue what you're talking about do you? 5 ms is at least 3x faster than you can even react to a visual stimulus. And don't forget that even if you get 120 fps in a game, it means you're only getting a new frame every 8 ms.[/citation]

Don't forget that any frame rate above the refresh rate of your monitor is wasted anyways.
 
This is great to see. With so many variables factoring in to your ping, this gives extreme gamers an extra edge. I recently installed the previous gen to play Bad Company 2. For those of you familiar with the game, there is an issue with dual-death instances....or a virtual tie in headshots. Bascially two players attack each other at the same time and kill each other at the same instance. The added 5 ms in ping has solved this issue for me. Since installing, I haven't had this happen once. The reduced ping also increases your chances of logging in to a full server. This card probably doesn't provide much of a benefit to the casual gamer, but for those of us that play competively, it helps!!!!
 
[citation][nom]drowned[/nom]You have no clue what you're talking about do you? 5 ms is at least 3x faster than you can even react to a visual stimulus. And don't forget that even if you get 120 fps in a game, it means you're only getting a new frame every 8 ms.[/citation]
Word.
 
@utengineer
So there was some guy you were constantly playing against with a ping within 1-4 of yours, so that this 5 ping improvement from the NIC somehow allowed you to get the upperhand on.

But not everyone, just people who are so close to your ping that you would get in situations where the server would produce a simultaneous kill/death.

Seems like a huge waste of money if that is the case.
 
You are correct. I play on servers where most of the players have 14-30 ping (Dallas, TX). 5ms is huge within the 14-30 ms range. I also manage a large gaming clan where we have private sessions. This card benefits me in various way. Like I mentioned, this card is not for the average gamer and would be a waste of money for them. Conversely, in environments where your opponents are highly skilled and practice tactical deployments, EVERY millisecond is important.
 
Flame on

I actually have a Bigfoot Killer NIC. I can actually comment on it's abilities having used it over the last few years.

It was the last piece of hardware I put into my computer and I only paid $100 on surprise sale.

My own empirical data shows me it works. My ping times did not drop by 50% or my FPS go up by some magical number. This is not why I bought it and experimented with it.

What I have noticed and tried to prove in my own way (if you don't like the way I tested, to bad) is that the game play was smoother.

I tested it the only way I could. By logging onto a BF2 that had 64 players and a ping of 140ish. I would have to play the game for a few minutes on the MB connection and then log out and hot swap to the Killer.

This is not the best way but as I can not afford 2 or 3 identical computers, it was the only way.

There was a difference. When everybody and their uncle was trying for a flag and you had APCs, tanks,jeeps, choppers, jets and ground personal swarming all over the place with bombs, grenades and gunfire all going on at the same time, There Was No Stuttering. There was stuttering on the MB connection.

I tried this several time on various servers over the years and found the same thing. NOTE: it only seemed to make a difference during intense game play. So is this card for WoW players or the like? I have no idea. I do know that for heavy FPS it made a difference to ME. I have been saving up for several months now and will be doing a major upgrade and the new Bigfoot will be going into it based on past experience.

The thumbs down can now commence from those who don't actually own it or have not actually tried it.



 
[citation][nom]shin0bi272[/nom]The thing I think youre missing is that they are selling it to gamers... not enterprise admins. Sure you need multiple high speed nics in a data center server... not in your dell at home playing counter strike. This is essentially an enterprise level piece of equipment being sold to the consumer market as "the fastest nic ever!!1!" and in reality your gigabit nic on your mobo isnt the issue with your lack of skills.[/citation]

Dedicated embedded processors and off-loading does not always guaruntee better performance. Software emulation on very powerful CPUs can quite often kick the crap out of dedicated hardware solutions as they are clocked so much less. Software/firmware south bridge RAID (ie. ICH10R) with a fast system CPU can easily beat a low end (100MHz) dedicated RAID controller.

You rather have to have super fast dedicated chips (1.2GHz dual core RAID cpus on Adaptec 5000 series RAID controllers are a good example) or be using a slow system CPU for the benefit to be really apparent.

This type of NIC would probably be great in an Atom based NAS server, but not as effective in an overclocked i7 gaming box or 2P Xeon 7500 server.
 
I think this cards main draw is that it offloads work from the processor. if the computer is slightly underpowered this card could help by allowing the processor to focus on the game. However tests in the past have shown performance increases well within the margin of error. Basically the gains you might achieve are potentially worthless. Needs to be much cheaper in order to be worth it.
 
10 times faster than a 100Mb NIC? Yup, since 1000Mb or 1Gb is indeed 10 times faster (theoretically) weird how math works out for the advertising department. "Performance-Inspired housing" WTF does that mean?????

This is a 110% waste of money.

to shin0bi272, "ASIC almost always = fail"

I assume you don't realize that ASIC's are in ALL of the core network devices of the internet right? Or maybe you just don't know what you are talking about.
 
[citation][nom]LLJones[/nom]...There Was No Stuttering... NOTE: it only seemed to make a difference during intense game play.[/citation]

This.

The reduction in ping is there, it helps, etc... etc... But if you are standing idle in a place with no action going on, no real players on the screen, and basically nothing happening, you won't notice that much at all if you have one of these cards installed.

Play it when a crap ton of stuff is going on, and you will, as that's what it is designed for. So, ping is cool and all, but it is more than just that.
 
Here is the lats page on the other killer NIC toms reviewed:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/killer-xeno-pro,2341-9.html

The article speaks for itself:
Without the core ability to wow us with ultra-low network latencies compared to less expensive solutions (like a freeware Firefox plugin), configuring your torrent client, or simply turning off your downloads during your gaming session, the Killer Xeno Pro is a tough sell as a must-have gaming NIC.
Click to expand...
 
The only benefit this offers, if offloading the Windows protocol stack to a different, dedicated CPU, saving your Host CPU a few cycles (unless of course the "NPU" is slower at this than Windows on your host processor). Unless your CPU is under a lot of load, it's not going to make any difference. The others here are also correct in that more of the latency in these online games is over the internet, which this will not help.

Furthermore, NICs such as your Intel, Marvell, Broadcom, and Realtek use Hardware Logic inside the chips, which is going to be faster than this 400Mhz processor running Software to do the same thing. The NIC takes ingress frames in, check the checksums in hardware logic, strips the frame off, and hands the packet to the protocol stack. On egress, it does pretty much the same in reverse (minus large send offload), all through HW logic.

Yes, this is a waste of money in my opinion as well. These days, on modern processors, at FULL line rate (1Gbs), most NICs consume less than 8% of your host CPU. At the rates in online gaming (generally less than 100K/sec), there will be no difference (especially when they're running other apps to control the thing, which it itself consumes CPU cycles at the host.)
 
Guys - you're all missing the point. The Killer NICs are tuned for latency while all your generic NICs are typically tuned for throughput (because they want to score well on NetPerf). The cruel truth, however, is that games care about latency, not throughput. This is because games send tons of relatively small packets very quickly and they have to be delivered in a timely fashion or, guess what? LAG, STUTTER, JERK, DEATH. I would hazard a guess that none you "experts" have ever tried one of these cards. Instead of trashing something without any idea what you are talking about, maybe you should look into it.
 
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