Hi,
I work for Bigfoot Networks (we make the Killer M1 and K1). I just wanted to respond to a few of these replys.
What's the point, seriously? Unless you computer comes with a really crappy NIC, or you're REALLY into 'every millisecond counts' gaming, no.
For a competitive gamer, every milisecond does count.
For a casual gamer, just the smoother more reliable network performance can make your gaming more enjoyable.
This is hilarious.
Was it funny when they first released slot based video cards instead of onboard video cards? Was the first GPU funny when they told you it would free up CPU power to improve the apperance of your games? People bashed those too, until they woke up and realized it worked.
Welcome to the future. Killer is the only network card with an NPU. Bypassing the windows network stack to gain a performance increase in online gaming.
how does this actually help over say gigabit ethernet onboard? connected to your router at 1gb/s your internet isnt' even that fast for most people. you'd have to have a direct tap into optical lines running from one of the major cities.
1gb is your bandwith, this has nothing to do with speed. That's the volume of data able to be passed at one time, not the speed at which it's being passed. Having 1gb compared to 10mb may prevent a bottleneck at that point IF you have ton's of data being moved at one time. The reality is, games don't use much data at one time; they need tiny pieces of data being moved faster.
You could increase your bandwith to 100gb and never see a speed increase until you add two things: bypass the windows network stack, and priorty UDP over TCP.
The other network cards/motherboards claiming to improve your network connection: improve TCP speeds. This does nothing for games. To improve network speed in games, UDP needs to be prioritized over TCP.
And before you even ask: Yes I know there are "routers" that claim UDP priority, but what you need to realize is that the difference between the Killer and a gaming router is that a gaming router is designed to get data to your computer as fast as possible.
Killer is designed to get data to your game as fast as possible once it hits your computer. Killer completely replaces the Windows Networking Stack with a hardware implementation, which allows it to get data to the game faster and more directly. Getting data to the game more quickly means data can get incorporated into the game up to several frames ahead of what users normally experience.
Killer frees up a small amount of CPU cycles because your CPU doesn't have to do networking anymore, and these cycles become critical when you need the CPU power the most -- i.e. -- when bombs are rocking your world in BF2 or when you are raiding Molten Core.
Just to be ultra-clear, the benefits of Killer are additive to the benefits of a gaming router. In other words, one does not replace the other and both offer different types of benefits.
most id spend for that is $39.99
It may be a kick ass NIC but they sure didn't do much consumer analysis before they marketed the thing.
The Killer has it's own CPU, RAM and operating system. Your asking for a computer to be sold for $39.99. We won't reach that price point any time soon.
The Killer isn't "just" a network card, it's a linux computer plugged into your PCI slot.
As for consumer analysis; we've done tons of market research, performance testing and so on. Everyone who has actually tried it, agress that it works. Price points are for another debate though; as there's too many factors involved from manufacturing to development costs to profit markups for retailers.
This isn't a mass produced piece of 10-20 year old technology like a normal network interface device.
Is this the same NIC as before without that ugly-azz heatsink? Is this why it is now "affordable"? Wasn't their other one like $250??
Guess this is their "Value" line.
The heatsink isn't really that expensive by itself; and was needed to cover all the various processing chips on the card. Removing the heatsink and running the card at a slower speed allowed for some minor reengineering that gives the K1 nearly the same performance as an M1 with a lower manufacturing cost that we pass along to consumers.
But the K1 is running at 333mhz instead of 400mhz and is not FNA enabled out of the box (it can be upgraded). There is also the potential that not all FNA products will run at 333mhz, and those will be M1 only.
who the heck is paying that much for a NIC card? When did $150 become affordable?
$150 for the K1 compared to $250 for the M1. It's a price comparison to our own product line. As for who is paying that much. Anyone who wants a more enjoyable online experience; and considering how many we've sold; there's clearly alot of online gamers who want that.
I play BF2 just fine on DSL on a wireless (G) network.
There's people who think they play just fine using AOL for games too. I wouldn't, but than I'm a pro gamer so to each his own.
