The Killer NIC is a must have if you’re going to build a high-end gaming rig. As far as simply adding it to boost performance, you might be better served with a faster video card or CPU. Still it did beat out the newer computer on ping times in some games, so it might be a worthwhile investment if slashing a few milliseconds off your ping time.
By: Simon "Soulrift" Ludgate
Published: Jan 28, 2009
Updated: Sep 2, 2010
Here at the GameSHOUT hardware labs we get to look at a lot of cool gaming hardware, but I don’t think we’ve ever had something as unique as the Killer NIC. This is a network card built for gamers: it’s designed to optimize performance while playing online games. It does this by offloading the network management from the computer and handling it on the card itself. This doesn’t just improve ping times by allowing network packets to be processed without waiting in line for CPU time, but also improves frame rate by allowing the CPU to skip processing the network packets.
I was, at first, a bit skeptical about whether or not the card would really do anything. My ISP is pretty barbaric and I’ve been butting heads with them over packet loss for half a year now. Besides, a 9 meg cable connection isn’t exactly big bandwidth; I sadly don’t have access to Japanese gigabit internet here. I also have a pretty good computer; with vsync locking the frame rate at 60 (yes, I game on a 60hz LCD TV) I rarely experience any shift in FPS: it’s pretty much locked in at 60 all the time.
On the other hand, the Killer NIC does offer some additional and intriguing features, such as FNApps. These Flexible Network Applications allow the card to do some extra stuff while processing network packets. The most exciting one I saw was the bittorrent app. This app allows you to download torrents directly onto a USB thumb drive through the network card: none of the packets or processing ever reaches the rest of your computer. This is a big deal, because torrents can slow down your computer considerably, as we’ll see later in this review.
In the interests of full technical disclosure, however, I have to report that I did have some problems with the card. When I first installed it on my Vista 32 machine, I was getting two tray icons instead of one. What the hey, I tried to use the card anyhow, and it worked enough to get some preliminary results. But after I tried to re-install the drivers with various protection systems (like anti-virus) disabled (as per the recommendation of Bigfoot’s support), not only did the twin tray icon problem return, but I my system was rendered inoperable by a blue screen of death. Removing the card was, sadly, the only remedy.
Therefore, the tests were conducted on an older Windows XP machine, a Pentium 4 3.0GHz with 2 gigs of RAM and an ATI X800 Pro video card. In order to ensure maximum compatibility, we installed the card and reformatted the system, and we ended up having no problems getting the card to work: no twin tray icon, no blue screens, it worked like a charm! As for the problems on the Vista machine, I don’t know if it’s a driver problem with Vista or the fact that our Vista machine has been through a lot of hardware swaps during various rounds of testing, but when I next reformat the system I’ll put in the Killer NIC and post an update to this review.
Anyhow, on to the tests. First up, World of Warcraft. I’m a big fan of WoW and I’ve been raiding since forever, and lag is never a good thing. Because WoW’s built in ping time is very unreliable, we used an add-on called Quartz, which has a very handy and accurate latency meter. Whenever you cast a spell in WoW, it sends a command to the server that you want to cast this spell, and the server does a check to see if you can actually cast this spell, and if you can the server tells you that you’re starting to cast the spell. Quarts measures this latency, the time between clicking on your spell and having the spell time start to cast, and displays it on your casting bar. Instead of checking for ping times every now and again, we get a very accurate measure of the current ping time with every spell we cast.
Unfortunately, this test proved to be harder than expected because of server lag. The ping times we recorded ranged anywhere from 87ms in a quiet, abandoned Exodar to over 6000ms during a 25-man Thaddius encounter. As such we had to confine our tests to ‘quiet’ areas of WoW, where our latency was coming from the internet and not from a buggy server.
With the Killer NIC, ping times on both computers were comparable: generally in the 90ms to 120ms range. Without the Killer NIC, the XP machine lagged a little bit more, with pings ranging from 100ms to 125ms. However, while ping times were relatively similar, the frame rate got a big boost with the Killer NIC, jumping from an average FPS of 45 on the XP machine without the Killer NIC to 55 with it. It seems that World of Warcraft puts out a pretty heavy network burden and the Killer NIC does a great job of handling it.
We also ran tests with everyone’s new favorite coop shooter: Left 4 Dead. This time, pings improved more significantly with the Killer NIC, dropping from an average of 110ms to an average of 100ms, while the Vista machine remained near 105ms. The frame rate also improved, but much less significantly, going up from only about 25 fps to 28 fps. It’s clear that the aging XP machine’s older video card is the limiting factor in Left 4 Dead frame rate, but I was very impressed at how the Killer NIC beat out the Vista computer’s on-board Ethernet card for ping times. Not by much, maybe, but it’s still a notable drop that you won’t get simply by improving your other hardware.
{slot15}Finally, we ran a test with the Bittorrent FNApp versus a software bittorent client, both with and without the Killer NIC onboard, while playing WoW and Left 4 Dead. With the bittorent FNApp client, there were no notable changes in either ping or frame rate, but with the software client we saw 20 134727359rops in frame rate and ping performance while running a big torrent with lots of peers. The Killer NIC did not do much to help with the software client, but why would you run that when you have the FNApp available? One of the reasons you might not is because the FNApp isn’t exactly intuitive. Mounting the USB drive requires some Linux command line usage, for example. I think Bigfoot Networks has to produce a nice front-end client for the FN architecture before it’s ready for the masses.
All in all, the Killer NIC is a must have if you’re going to build a high-end gaming rig. As far as simply adding it to boost performance, you might be better served with a faster video card or CPU, as the Killer NIC on an old Pentium 4 was no match for a high end Intel Core 2 Duo for raw frame rate. Still, it did beat out the newer computer on ping times in some games, so it might be a worthwhile investment if slashing a few milliseconds off your ping time is what you need to get the most out of your game! Not to mention it looks great, with its stylized K heatsink. Make sure you put this in a computer with a view!
Score: 8.8 (out of 10)
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