5. Summary and Conclusion

At a price of over $200, the M1 Killer NIC costs as much as a good motherboard, and twice as much as a decent budget motherboard. Obviously, it must deliver sufficient value to justify the added expense, at least for gamers serious (and well-heeled) enough to care about the benefits that this card delivers. As our testing illustrates, those benefits come in two tangible forms—namely, reduced latency in network access times and improved frame rates while playing games online. We saw only modest reductions in CPU utilization on our QX9650 test systems, but believe those differences should increase on slower CPUs with fewer cores inside them.

Our own testers (which included a couple of diehard full-on teenaged gamers from our neighborhood, as well as author Toby Digby and his cousin, Steven Tran) also reported a definite improvement in the fluidity and smoothness of their gaming experience when using the Killer NIC as opposed to the built-in Realtek GbE interface on the Gigabyte motherboard. Such comments are hard to quantify or pin down precisely, but gamers reported quicker reaction times in their virtual worlds, a better ability to anticipate and track opponents and general improvements in their scoring as well. Tough though these qualities may be to measure objectively, they should (and apparently do) constitute a powerful lure for serious gamers.

Only you can decide if a smoother ride and better scores are worth the extra outlay—the M1 Killer NIC will set you back anywhere from $220 to around $250, depending on where you buy it—but for an increasing number of existing owners, that outlay appears to have already been justified. If you’re willing to part with the cash, you can probably turn it to your advantage in online gaming by acquiring an M1 Killer NIC. Bigfoot also makes a K1 Killer NIC that we did not test, which lacks the fancy heatsink, offers no developer support code and its NPU runs at 333 instead of 400 MHz. You can find the K1 Killer NIC in retail channels for between $160 and $180 if the M1 is too much for your budget. We’d also like to share one final and unrelated technical observation: Having recently worked with the 65-nm QX6800 and now having spent some time with the 45-nm QX9650, we couldn’t help but notice their differences in heat output and operating temperatures. Whereas the QX6800 clocks operating temperatures in the high 40s (all temps mentioned here are in °C) at idle and climbs into the high 50s under load with occasional peaks in the low 60s, the QX9650 idles in the high 30s to low 40s and seldom breaks into the 50s at all. The highest temperatures we observed with the QX9650 were in the 53-55 °C range, using the same Zalman CNPS 9500 cooler on all builds. We’re impressed!