I was reading an article on bit and noticed this advert: which links here, where they claim (among other things) that it will increase your fps some how! Is this a joke? surely no one is stupid enough to spend £170 on a network card?
People buy them, they have been around for a while so I assume they do quite well. If I was going to spend several K on a machine the likely hood is that I have a very large amount of disposable income so a game that will make my online gaming smoother would appeal. I have seen MUCH more expensive network interfaces for use in servers and to plug into certain network devices. You wouldn't believe the premium applied to something when in reality it probably gives 50% extra performance and 1000% extra price. But then time is money, so spending £1000 on something that will speed up your business by 2% may just be worth its weight in gold over time.
Also as I remember they have a really light version of linux onboard, so you can plug in a hard disk and use the NIC as a BT downloader while the main machine is switched off. Still not worth it though IMO.
As an FPS-increasing tool I think it's pretty much a redundant piece of kit. One thing that I seem to remember that it does do is run a bit-torrent client while the computer is off (with +5V-sb). Either way, pretty cool-looking thing. Not worth £170 though.
Where does it save the data to? For £170 it should automatically download all the porn or torrents from the internet for me. Or, to increase my FPS I could drop it on a new graphics card, CPU.. memory.. motherboard, new hard drive (or two)...
The Killer NIC has an onboard CPU, so it means your standard CPU has to do less work because it isn't controlling your onboard network device, hence increasing your FPS. That's what they say anyway. Sam
USB hard drive iirc, I read a review when they actually hit the stores a while back (out of curiosity), and it looked pretty useful. Uber low-powered DL rig.
As has been mentioned it runs an embedded linux, so you can farm off your firewall, even performing deep packet inspection on it. Good idea in theory but doubt they sold many except to a few geeks who wanted to fiddle with it and a few nubs who thought it'd give em more fps!
They should have made a bigger deal about the built in linux OS because that's pretty cool, although still too expensive. It would be better if you could use it as a standalone torrentbox.
The logic is that it optimises network traffic by taking most of the workload off the CPU. This supposedly reduces lag and increases game frame updates --hence fps (subjectively). Several tests have been published, and results are a bit conflicting. Some report a genuine improvement; some report no difference at all. YMMV. Modding project, right there.
Being I'm a complete network junky, I imagine I'm going to have one of these in my next desktop. What's cooler than your NIC having it's own dedicated processor? I'm also going to be buying enterprise grade networking equipment too. Cisco router, Cisco switch, and a Cisco access point. COMPLETE overkill, but it's something I <3.
NIC is only as good as what it connects to. $20 NIC is plenty for the craptastic speeds from our Qwest DSL. john
Exactly my thinking - surely that extra £170 makes what another lets say £10 available per month for the next 17 months to spend on better broadband. Most of the BB companies (well Virgin anyway) tend to reduce their prices in that much time or offer free upgrades to the next higher BB package (like Virgin). For me, I'm paying for 20Mb BB - Virgin just released their 50Mb this year. I hear that sometime next year they will be launching their 100Mb system and if all goes wel all the currnet 20Mb will get a free upgrade to the 50Mb. I've had this process going on ever since I starte dwith blueyonder with 256kb - each year/two I've gotten free upgrades to the next highest package when the BB launches a faster service!
So if I hook a up a powersupply to the card I have can make it a small torrent downloader? As a NIC I wouldn't have it, but I can see some potential for a pci card sized PC. Downloading uhm nature movies on something smaller then a stack of playboys
