Killer NIC , Killer K1 worht the money?

I'm interested in the Killer NIC and the Killer K1 nic's?

Anybody have any thoughts on these. I know some people say they are paper weights, I see some newegg reviews that state the opposite.

I'd like to have the best gaming setup possible and I was wondering if these would be beneficial at all.

Yeah KILLER NIC works well IF u have a premium CABLE connection, and a high end gaming pc, it wont work with DSL or Satellite or wireless.

I don't think you'll get any more performance than what you would get with a router that has port priority.

You're better off wasting your money on an AGEIA PhysX card.

Yea thanks for the replies. This sounds like a rip off for sure.

I just picked up a nice Hawkings 1gb nic and say good enough.

Id buy it just beacuse it looks so dam cool

no really it does look cool. If it incorporated the dual gigabyte ethernet thing like i believe the 680i has...

No not worth it at all. Glad to see you didn't buy it.

Zen is totally right here, 100 percent !

Oh really, why dont you time you round trip ping time to a game server and tell me the percentage difference a killer nic would actually make, once it hits your router, your packet is subject to the mercy of the phone lines or your cacle companys lines, so how is shaving off a tiny bit going to help ? Even at a lan party the difference is probably negligible. Next you'll be saying that the difference is NOTICEABLE between 80 fps and 85. In REAL actual life, he'll never notice his more responsive stack , and if he needs more USB ports, he'd be better off with a new MB with the money he saved. Sure if it is worth it to him, then fine, but Zen's argument holds water, period and is correct.

I ping my local router..........

Reply from 192.168.1.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64

I ping TomsHardware.Com
Reply from 208.48.160.11: bytes=32 time=94ms TTL=50
Reply from 208.48.160.11: bytes=32 time=93ms TTL=50
Reply from 208.48.160.11: bytes=32 time=95ms TTL=50
Reply from 208.48.160.11: bytes=32 time=93ms TTL=50

My local ping is under 1ms which could be as low as 0.1ms but let's go for 0.75ms for a reasonable high estimate.

Now, The packet needs to leave my PC to be processed by my router and returned. Let's assume 0.00ms wire time and 2/3rds of the time is taken by my PC. This leaves 0.50ms response time for my PC. Now, lets assume that your NIC is twice as fast which would cut the delay on my PC from 0.5ms to 0.25ms.

Now, 0.25ms reduction in a 94ms trasactions is close to one fourth of one percent. So, if I was getting 400FPS, this may get me to 401FPS.

Anything less than 200FPS would get me less than 1fps :>

And I have seen the reviews, and none showed results different beyond standard deviation.

I also work in very large environments so I fully understand the impact of "idle" chatter which you claim to be trying to overcome.

One network I was working with had an idle chatter of about 2,000-3,000 packets a second. This is what I would pickup on a PC sitting idle and not talking to anybody.

(Most was Windows Desktop PC chatter due to browswer announcements, etc... between about 15,000 PCs on our local portion of the WAN)

I was able to quickly reduce this to under 100 packets a second by tweaking the Windows OS on all of the PCs.

The result was that I was that I could still not measure any performance difference using the network, even with analysis tools.

So, I highly doubt the small number of stray packets on a home persons network is limiting the performance of the PC. The special stack to bypass this small amount of traffic is pointless as best.

Sure, stack bypassing for gaming is pretty much useless, it would be impossible to see the small impact it has on latency reduction. My point is that it IS concievably useful in certain other applications.

The problem is, people are borderline offended by the price/performance tradeoff with this thing. In all honesty, it's more useful to look at it as a tech demonstration. As such, it DOES showcase what is essentially an entirely new type of NIC. I personally look at it as an interesting gadget that I don't really want.

I really hope this was a very bad attempt at a troll... every argument made above isn't specificially about the K1, it's about the idea paying a relatively huge amount of cash for an NIC with technology and features that just isn't beneficial enough to warrent such a high cost...

The killer NIC is to a regular nic as Bling H2O is to bottled water. IOW spend that money towards a monitor/v-card/memory or just about anything else. Also I thought the golden rule to networking gaming is the 'games latency' is fast as the slowest computer? So what if you have this and your buddies have built in Nics, wouldn't the fact your's is slightly faster be negated?It does look pretty.

Why on earth anyone would wanna pay 300 dollars for a Network card is beyond me...

But if they did, they would need a mirror, turn around and check the ass..

Cos thats where the brain would be...

Buy a faster video card instead. Upgrade the processor, put in more ram, buy a 32mb Cache Hard disk..

But do not waste 300 dolla on a turd board nic

Easy, chookman, there was a post made by an actual Bigfoot employee on this topic this morning, which as you can see, has been deleted. Also, this isn't the oldest thread I found to be dug up today. Was a couple from 2000 dug up as well.

More like an answer from a pro gamer with unlimited funds.

Alright so it did show improvement for 2 particular games. But is (giving the benefit of the doubt) a 10% frame rate improvement worth $200+ ? Like everyone said unless you are a pro gamer (or are obsessive compulsive ) they can keep it.

all the positives of getting the nic away from onbard to safety for the board and the nic, is there. But a 15 dollar netgear does the same, and it is easier to chuck in the trash after it is killed.
the killer nic has a function in some extreme, not for gamers on home connects. (I would actually like to know the REAL purpose of such a card) Some kind of network charger for servers, a "leader nic"? what is it?
the memory onboard seems interesting enough, the big clock and its own cpu, and blah blah blah-it is rather bizarre.

Hi all,

i am actually looking into buying this NIC so i ended up on this thread. The reason i am interested is for work and not gaming. But i am also playing games so i thought i'd leave my comment. I do design software for use with stock exchanges where nic speed is important.

So here is the deal. Some games use UDP protocol for transmitting data. UDP is not like TCP where you receive all packets no matter what, if the NIC or the computer is busy then you lose the packet and then you have to request it and receive it again. This is the reason where you sometimes end up seeing things that happened in the past (a few hundred ms before) and then again to the present. This NIC will probably not lose any frames or at least a lot fewer than a NIC that depends on the CPU. So it is possible that you will see 5% or even more increase in performance. I think the card is designed for high end systems like what we use in our job, in a lower price. Imagine the millions of packets nasdaq has to handle every second and how important it is not to lose any of them. They use cards like this.

Nicolas Siatras

you should read and understand more of other people's posts before starting the wrong arguments...

I have one in my computer and have found that the game play is very smooth in fps (BF2) no matter how much is happening.
I also only paid 125 for it. Wait for a sale. The other reason I bought it was I very carefully planned my rig and was able to use all 3 pcie and 2 of the pci. One for the Killer N.I.C., one for the auzen prelude 7.1( that is a upgrade worth every penny, the sound quality is unbelievably better than onboard). IMO it seems to play better than without it.

I would say in theory only. I did a very loose test by logging into a game, playing a few minutes, logging out and then logging in again to the same server using the Killer. I managed to do this three times. I noticed a difference for the better using the Killer nic. When trying to take a control point with 8 or 9 guys running around shooting, throwing hand grenades, choppers, jets, apc's, jeeps and tanks all trying to take/hold the point, there was no stuttering, without the card there was stuttering in similar circumstances. The connect ping never varied by more than 2 points when reconnecting. It was a 76ms ping site.

I am sure that there are people out there who can come up with reasons why this happened, but I tried to limit the variables.

Again, I only paid $125 CDN for a new card. My experiences are mine alone, and I say the card works. Not so much for ping, but for smoother game play. $250 for a new card? It would be iffy to buy. Unless you have the money and are putting together a high end system and this is the last purchase.

Dear All,

I think you are a little off topic, since the discussion here (how i see it), will it improve game performance. however, everyone is discussing how a network card improves FPS. I find is silly, since this is not primary function of network card, it is primary function of video card. Even thought, external NIC improved FPS it is "side effect" and not primary effect.
Generally, for online game apart from FPS there is connection with server, Latency. This determines how fast you send/receive responses from server. this affect how smooth you see whatever you doing in game world, and how fast you receive information of other players behavior.
Thus, you may have 80 FPS, but you try to interact with the world and see some delay in this interaction. This is Latency problem. Although, this as well may be the problem of some Intermediate router, might be a local card as well. Additional NIC card provides same benefit as addon sound/video cards, in comparison with integrated ones. They improve a specific operation, AND, since they take the load of the CPU, they improve overall system performance as side effect. By adding Killer card, you improve network performance, since it is the card who does all calculations and not CPU.
Thus, with Killer you improve the interaction aspect of the online game, and not FPS.

But to answer the original question: I think it is a lot of money for NIC card. When price drops up to some 80$, it would be a good addition to your PC, if you seek to improve Latency.

I laugh at anyone who bought this ***, seriously how can anyone have been that stupid. If you REALLY want a server grade nic you should of bought one of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6833106033

Same effect 10% the cost.

If you already have the best CPU, then what?