Legit Reviews

Bigfoot Networks Killer 2100 Gaming Network Card Review

Network cards are like sound cards for most end users, in that a majority are happy as can be with the ports that their motherboard comes with, and Bigfoot Networks is the kingpin of the gaming network card market, providing gamers with "The" NICs (Network Interface Cards) to have. Well, today we are looking at the latest standalone NIC from Bigfoot Networks, the Killer 2100. More importantly we will be seeing if high performance gaming network cards live up to their hype.



Article Title: Bigfoot Networks Killer 2100 Gaming Network Card Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1478/1/
Pricing At Time of Print: $89.99 shipped

I'd rather spend the cash on a real server class NIC which also offloads TCP/UDP from the OS

Same price, but proven tech.

the card is fast, but onboard LAN chips are just so fast now that the difference is unnoticeable

$85 to gain a couple ms improvement in online games which will not be noticeable. In the article it is compared to sound cards but it lacks worthwhile features beyond the base improvement like sound cards do. Motherboard audio has gotten to the point that sound card audio improvements are rather small and hard to notice for many people. Yet sound cards still provide value through things like Dolby Digital Live encoding, headphone virtual 5.1, DTS:neo and Dolby Pro Logic upmixing.

If the Killer card could do something worthwhile beyond a 2-3ms improvement in latency I could consider buying one, but right now I think I'd feel I got ripped off if I bought one.

I would have liked to have seen results of game pings while downloading/uploading and/or torrenting files. That would be interesting. Otherwise in my opinion the card seems pointless.

The big issue that doesn't seem to be mentioned at all here is the fact that the network settings for optimal gaming are different than for optimal office use (ie Windows default).

To quote from Leatrix:
"Online games generally use the TCP protocol which requires that network segments sent to your computer be acknowledged in order to provide a reliable connection.

Windows bundles these acknowledgements together and sends them in pairs. While this is an efficient way of dealing with them generally, the inevitable delays caused by the bundling process increase latency considerably.

This is because when Windows queues up an acknowledgement in order to bundle it with the following one, the game server has to wait for the acknowledgement timer to expire before sending new data.

Leatrix Latency Fix removes the acknowledgement bundling process so that an acknowledgement is sent immediately for every segment that's received. This produces a significant reduction in latency as there is no longer a delay before new data is sent to your computer.

In a normal networking environment, you would prioritise network efficiency over latency and use the Windows defaults, but in online games the opposite is true and you want the lowest latency you can possibly get."

There is a whole article there as well as a tool to really lower your ping times dramatically by changing how TCP behaves. The cost? The time it takes to move huge files goes up. I suppose there are other costs as well but most of us are after really low ping times. http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/i ... cyFix.html

DX wrote:leatrix latency info

I used that win7 latency fix once, but all it ever did was make the ping a bit more consistent because windows occasionally had lag spikes. I havn't had the lag spikes in several months on many different windows installations without that fix, so I assume there was a windows update which addressed this. Hence, not being mentioned.

also keep in mind within your system with the killer, latency is .3ms, and onboard is ordinarily ~2ms. when you are pinging 64 to a server, the difference between 64ms and 66ms would hardly be noticed in any scenario. keeping in mind, the killer does not go through windows at all and onboard does. and the higher your ping the less you would notice this difference. i use 64 ping as an example because most servers I play, in any game are in Chicago (~60-70ms) or further, or in the case of L4D2 commonly MUCH further.

True but then for me my lag went from 300-330 down to 30-40. So your mileage may vary. I might add that I'm in South Dakota and far from any game server.

DX wrote:True but then for me my lag went from 300-330 down to 30-40. So your mileage may vary. I might add that I'm in South Dakota and far from any game server.

with the latency fix? what OS?

and i'm from maine, farther from any game servers.

It worked the same for XP, Vista 64 and Windows 7 64 bit. All three showed a huge improvement with the latency fix. XP though showed the biggest improvement.

just installed the fix for a laptop i have, and it does work well, think it may be more efficient on older hardware (on a single core 1.66GHz w/ win7 32) but the better the system the less it affects performance, which is much the same as with the Killer 2100 itself

True and most of us haven't got some uber system to play with so I wonder how well the Killer 2100 would do on an older system vs Leatrix.