Hardware Bigfoot Networks Killer 2100 Gaming Network Card Review

Can the latest evolution of the Killer NIC justify its £60 price tag?

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2010/09/02/killer-2100-gaming-network-card/1

 

The biggest difference I've been able to make to my ping/upload/download Internet speed was to get one of those 'free'* wall socket replacements that take out the bell wire signal, from BT.

It took my speed from a reported max of 1408 kbs (tragic I know) to a reported 2416 kbs ...an incredible 1008 kbs or 41.7% increase!

If you haven't already I can't recommend this little upgrade enough.

* 'free' = £1.20 for p&p on your next bill and just for clarity ordinarily I loath BT and have no working or paid connection with them other than my phone line and bill!

 

Why did this receive a '6' for value?

Given it provides no tangible benefit AND costs £68, I would have thought a 2 or 3 would have been more appropriate.

 

The trouble is that any system is only ever as fast as its slowest step - and in this situation, the local network card is far from the slowest step.

The slowest step is always going to be the broadband connection (at least until they roll out 100Mbps fibre connections), and no amount of flashy network kit in your home will change that.

This kind of product is targeted at people who don't know any better and really believe that 3/1000s of a second is the difference between winning and losing...

 

Is there anything interesting you can do with the CPU these days, or still very little?

I know you could run a firewall on it at one point, but unless you run Norton 2007 or something I'm guessing your firewall isn't going to harm your gaming PC's performance.

 

Did you also try this card using TCP otimizer?

 

Any reason that the file transfers were only going at 11 MB/s? I've got a cheap rosewill switch and a pair of intel PCI-e nics and get 100-120 MB/s across my network. From your results, it looks like you've got something limiting your small network to 100 Mb/s, perhaps the lack of jumbo frames?

For reference, a gigabit connection's maximum theoretical throughput should be about 128 MB/s, minus some for overhead, resulting in a real-world best case expectation of about 120 MB/s; a 100 Mb/s connection's maximum theoretical throughput is 12.8 MB/s, with real world expectation of 10-11MB/s. Also, don't forget to use 4-9k jumbo frames, as (much like the 4k sectors on WD's new drives vs 512b on regular) there's tremendous overhead with using 1.5k frames. In my experience, 1.5k frames will limit your network to a maximum of about 80-90 MB/s.

 

Testing in FPS Games is great - hows about testing World Of Warcraft/Starcraft 2 latencies, I don't know enough about networks to comment if these games are more or less demanding than an FPS, be interesting to see though.

also there is a standard ping registry tweak:

1. Open the registry editor by going start->run and typing "regedit" then pressing enter
2. Nagivate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\"
3. Look in each of the keys inside that one (they look like: {random numbers and letters]) and determine which one is your network connection. You can tell this since it will have your computers local ip address stored in it.
4. Add a new key called "TcpAckFrequency" of type REG_DWORD and set the value to 1.
4b. If you are using windows 2000 call this new key "TcpDelAckTicks" and set it to 0 instead.
5. Restart your computer.

Only once you have an optimised system can you decide if the product is truly viable - although one would expect any assiciated drivers to do this for you.

the very fact that you can do more than one thing sounds good - occasionally the family watch video's from my PC whilst I game online, this can be a problem - so if this product would resolve some of these issues - £68 starts to look appealing.

 

These gaming network cards historically had a lot of people complains about lack of driver support.
A cheaper and probably better supported card would be an Intel server network card from eBay/somewhere else.

 

Whoa, what a surprise. I read many reviews of that garbage and I did not expected nothing radical from bit-tech crew. But I'm surprised with such high score. 2 or 3/10 overall score is high enough IMHO.

People singing during game of football "There is only one X Y!"
I want to say only one thing: There is only one Intel!

Any other NIC is garbage.

 

0/10 is more appropriate. costs money and does nothing.

 

Wouldn't a router with decent QoS be a better upgrade for downloading + gaming?

 

i have to agree who runs 100mb based networks to transfer files, ignoring that card is not worth the cost

 

Mmm I thought steam stopped background downloading when playing another steam game. So downloading a new Steam purchase whilst playing an older (steam) game would not be possible.

 

yeah 11MB/s your doing something very wrong there unless there is a b B confusion going on

 

oh and no Killer nic -> Killer Nic comparison

 

i'm not sure why this company continues to make these cards. the idea is nice but networks aren't strenuous enough. think about it - if you had the money to buy this card, your computer probably has plenty of processing power left over for the network.

if they really wanted to make a product to consider they'd make a UPU (usb processing unit). i'm not sure if usb controllers are technically their own processor but from what i've heard, i'm guessing they aren't. usb handles a LOT more information than a gaming NIC. but, i think the reason a UPU hasn't been done yet is because usb isn't really cpu demanding at all unless its software based, in which case a UPU wouldn't help anyway. i'm just throwing out ideas.

i am aware that since sounblaster live!, soundcards now have their own processors. they aren't really heavy duty, but they don't need to be

 

Well, am I right in thinking that these devices perform MUCH better when there are huge numbers of players in (say) WoW or when you're downloading torrents while you game?

 

No, because the limiting factor will still be your broadband speed - the connection from you to your ISP is much, much slower than the connection from (say) Blizzard to your ISP. No amount of offloading the network stack onto a separate processor is ever going to solve crap ADSL speeds.

Yes, this was demonstrated in the article, but only if you throttle the torrents back a long way.

 

seriously who falls for buying this??? and really a 6/10 for Value, given the results I would say its more like a 4/10