NIC card made for gamers

[Helevitia]

400Mhz processor and 64MB of PC2100 DDR memory, packet optimization....

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=3316

[schmosef]

dumb

[MultimediaMan]

32 Bit PCI? No PCI-e? Puhleeze....

Pardon me whilst I stick with my 64Bit PCI-X Intel NICs...

[High_Jumbllama]

Gigabit on 32bit 33mhz PCI is a waste. Reminds me of when Promise starting coming out with Serial ATA cards for PCI.

[Mehen]

has very little to do with bandwidth, its all about latency, in theory* it should help.

[Wombat]

has very little to do with bandwidth, its all about latency, in theory* it should help.

Why should it help? If the data I need is cached on the NIC, how is that helping me? It's still not on the wire(outbound) or in the CPU(inbound), where I need it.

[Mehen]

Did you read the article?

[Wombat]

First, it's a press release, not an article. But yes, I read it.

Utilizing a 400MHz network processor with 64MB of dedicated PC-2100 DDR memory,

Home users don't use jumbo frames at all, and games use lots of small packets. What are you going to do with 64MB onboard? And if you were going to cache, why use a relatively high latency memory system? A smaller amount of on-die cache is much smarter.

MaxFPS technology frees up CPU cycles typically taken up by heavy network traffic by offloading the required processing onto the Killer NIC’s 400MHz network processor.

What NIC doesn't do some of that these days? And what desktop machine has its CPU weighed down with network traffic (notice I'm excluding servers. Notice also that they aren't targetting the server market? hmmm).

UltimatePing technology lowers ping by optimizing data delivery to games faster while PingThrottle technology allows users to increase or decrease ping accordingly. GameFirst Technology prioritizes network packets for games instead of background downloading utilities such as BitTorrent.

Not enough detail here, but this sounds like QoS, or it at least serves the same function.

While NVIDIA has implemented features similar to MaxFPS and GameFirst in the form of its FirstPacket and TCP/IP offload functions of the nForce 500 series of chipsets, the Killer NIC is the first standalone network card to offer such features.

So other companies already do this (like I said), and they do it without dedicated RAM?

This is a gimmick. I bet it has no performance increase compared to using a home router with QoS enabled.

[rylan]

LOL what a waste of hardware design effort. Whatever group of engineers made that thing must have no self respect. Its a 100% Marketecture product.

[Mehen]

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1944121,00.asp

[Jammrock]

This will be a "prove it to me first" product. Now, if I were a tweaker and had one of those "tricked out" plexiglass windows on my case, I might get it for the kewlness factor when people look inside. But since I'm not, I want to see independent evidence first.

[ZokesPro]

Kinda useless. Marketing indeed.

[Mehen]

This will be a "prove it to me first" product.

That's what I was thinking. I just hope it doesn't fall through the cracks because of all the early skepticism. If it works at a reasonable price: great - I'll take one, if not, kudos for trying.

[VJ]

Gigabit on 32bit 33mhz PCI is a waste. Reminds me of when Promise starting coming out with Serial ATA cards for PCI.

Actually, the SATA cards for PCI are less of a waste: it would allow you to connect SATA drives on a PC that wouldn't normally support it. While it might not perform well, there might be situations in which this could be useful.

But for the NIC card...


Jörg

[Nowhere]

Actually, it's not really a waste at all - yeah, SATA has higher bandwith than PCI...but which consumer HDD can approach either of them?