BF2S Forums gaming nic

The Ultimate Waste Of Money

Noobeater wrote:

steelie34 wrote:

does this really improve things?  i always thought your ISP impacted your gaming more than anything else... waste of money or solid purchase?

http://www.killernic.com/

Yep those are as far as i know pretty pointless. As you said the most important factor regarding lag is your ISP and the internet facilities around your house e.g. copper cables, fibre optic. How many people accessing it etc... etc...

What is really worth doing though as i found out the other day is making sure your router is connected to the first phone socket of your house, i moved mine and went up about .4 mb/s.

inb4 technical grammer nazi's commenting about my use of units.

s/mb\s/Mbps/

On your local loop, it doesn't really matter at all whether it's copper or fiber. Even if you run a full 330ft Cat5 UTP cable between your computer and your router, you're talking about a propagation delay of around 500 nanoseconds, so that's a bit of a myth. Making sure you have as little noise as possible in your connection is important, and replacing old outlets and old wiring can in some cases remove enough link attenuation to give you several Mbps of added capacity, which would definitely decrease your latency.

The KillerNIC itself is pretty difficult to place. It lets you outsource the sometimes inefficient network stack in Windows to a very efficient network stack on the card itself. It does have some neat applications for manipulating traffic on it, but none that most users will use. The feature most pertinent to your question, application-based QoS, can be done natively in Windows Vista and Windows 7, so unless you're into XP, it's sort of a moot point. In some cases it might give you a bit of a boost, but considering that on the subject of latency the NIC is a small part in a much bigger equation, it's probably not worth the price tag for most people.

Freezer7Pro wrote:

It's a joke. Professional server NICs cost less.

"Professional server" NICs that cost less than the KillerNIC usually don't have anything going for them other than native 802.1q, LACP, and other stuff you won't have use for in your average home network. Most commodity servers ship with generic Broadcom and Marvell chipsets that you find in workstations as well.

Freezer7Pro wrote:

mikkel wrote:

Freezer7Pro wrote:

It's a joke. Professional server NICs cost less.

"Professional server" NICs that cost less than the KillerNIC usually don't have anything going for them other than native 802.1q, LACP, and other stuff you won't have use for in your average home network. Most commodity servers ship with generic Broadcom and Marvell chipsets that you find in workstations as well.

You get a quite decent Intel NIC for $130.

Define "decent"

I read somewhere one time ( a review from I dont know where)  that the killer ones can take off about 5 from your ping... if you think there price is worth that.....

mikkel wrote:

Noobeater wrote:

steelie34 wrote:

does this really improve things?  i always thought your ISP impacted your gaming more than anything else... waste of money or solid purchase?

http://www.killernic.com/

Yep those are as far as i know pretty pointless. As you said the most important factor regarding lag is your ISP and the internet facilities around your house e.g. copper cables, fibre optic. How many people accessing it etc... etc...

What is really worth doing though as i found out the other day is making sure your router is connected to the first phone socket of your house, i moved mine and went up about .4 mb/s.

inb4 technical grammer nazi's commenting about my use of units.

s/mb\s/Mbps/

On your local loop, it doesn't really matter at all whether it's copper or fiber. Even if you run a full 330ft Cat5 UTP cable between your computer and your router, you're talking about a propagation delay of around 500 nanoseconds, so that's a bit of a myth. Making sure you have as little noise as possible in your connection is important, and replacing old outlets and old wiring can in some cases remove enough link attenuation to give you several Mbps of added capacity, which would definitely decrease your latency.

The KillerNIC itself is pretty difficult to place. It lets you outsource the sometimes inefficient network stack in Windows to a very efficient network stack on the card itself. It does have some neat applications for manipulating traffic on it, but none that most users will use. The feature most pertinent to your question, application-based QoS, can be done natively in Windows Vista and Windows 7, so unless you're into XP, it's sort of a moot point. In some cases it might give you a bit of a boost, but considering that on the subject of latency the NIC is a small part in a much bigger equation, it's probably not worth the price tag for most people.

I'm just gonna act like I understood this and agree with mikkel here.

The_Sniper_NM wrote:

Freezer7Pro wrote:

mikkel wrote:

"Professional server" NICs that cost less than the KillerNIC usually don't have anything going for them other than native 802.1q, LACP, and other stuff you won't have use for in your average home network. Most commodity servers ship with generic Broadcom and Marvell chipsets that you find in workstations as well.

You get a quite decent Intel NIC for $130.

'scuse me I'll just leave this here.
http://www.evga.com/products/prodlist.asp?switch=22

Btw, the EVGA NIC has a usb port, audio jacks and a small linux distro. You can offload TS and mumble completely, and can even torrent to a flash drive in the usb port while gaming-lag free.

Edit, if it isn't apparent, I'm thinking-most likely getting this when it comes on the market. However, biggest advantages are said to be in wow, like 70ms ping reduction.

It raises framerate much more, but tbh I don't need frames, rather have the ping reduction.

I'd love to see how a massive bandwidth using program can simply save it's data to a flash drive and magically not use so much bandwidth. The problem with torrents is how much data they transfer over the network, not anything to do with where the file is saved.

Next: A 70ms ping reduction in WoW? Only WoW? Ignoring the fact that it means that there are software tricks being used (hey, didn't that description say something about some basic QOS?) and less advantage to the actual hardware, a 70ms ping difference will hardly be noticed. Finally, offloading 1 program to run on another OS won't raise your framerate by much, a new NIC and the lack of TS in the cpu cycle is simply not a big difference.

If it is so amazing, I'd love to see some benchmarks and I'd prefer to be shut up about it but until then it sounds like a joke. Or at least an expensive one.

jaymz9350 wrote:

Defiance wrote:

I'd love to see how a massive bandwidth using program can simply save it's data to a flash drive and magically not use so much bandwidth. The problem with torrents is how much data they transfer over the network, not anything to do with where the file is saved.

Didn't say anything about bandwidth, just lag.  Saving to a flash drive will keep it from constantly hitting your HDD with your game on it (saying you only have one drive) and probably QOS to give the game priority.  those combined would probably reduce lag, not saying it's worth the $$ for one or that it wold be massive gains.

The bandwidth usage causes lag. In most games, outside the loading screen, you're not using the HDD that much so HDD usage really doesn't matter. Not that it effects the network traffic at all, come to think of it. The biggest thing here would be QOS to hold the torrent traffic back, but I've already got that on my router and Vista (though I only use the router).

GC_PaNzerFIN wrote:

This kind of expensive crap was already proven fail in first gen. Go buy a new graphics card instead. I bet you see a little bit better framerate increase than with this joke.

And torrenting to flash drive? lol I have so many HDDs to torrent to without touching my main drive... its the damn bandwidth loss that causes issues.

Torrenting is pretty taxing on much more than just your network connection and your disks. Try torrenting onto a disk while playing a single-player game off of another disk. Chances are your framerate will drop significantly.

mikkel wrote:

GC_PaNzerFIN wrote:

This kind of expensive crap was already proven fail in first gen. Go buy a new graphics card instead. I bet you see a little bit better framerate increase than with this joke.

And torrenting to flash drive? lol I have so many HDDs to torrent to without touching my main drive... its the damn bandwidth loss that causes issues.

Torrenting is pretty taxing on much more than just your network connection and your disks. Try torrenting onto a disk while playing a single-player game off of another disk. Chances are your framerate will drop significantly.

O really like I haven't been playing Crysis with torrents on without issues?

Hmm I wonder which one gives better framerate.... NIC + GTX 260 or GTX 260 SLi.... hmmmm

edit: Killer NIC Xeno Ultra will ship in May, priced at $179.99.

Last edited by GC_PaNzerFIN (2009-04-18 03:38:06)

Because you can buy africking GTX 260 instead of the NIC.

And that will result in 100000000000000000000000000 times higher results than that NIC.

Last edited by GC_PaNzerFIN (2009-04-18 03:58:53)

You got in the way, sorry if you thought its about you. Probably because you quoted me first

Last edited by GC_PaNzerFIN (2009-04-18 05:24:17)