Gaming Nics

cHk4

cHk4

cHk4

Soldato
Joined
21 Jun 2005
Posts
9,223
Are they worth it? I don't ever suffer from lag, normally get good pings on most games I play, do they effect things that much?
 
No. I think it was shown that on low end PCs they can increase FPS by a small percentage but since the people who would be buying such things generally have high end machines it makes zero difference.

Also, never buy anything with "Gamer" in the title, it just screams overpriced.
 
Depends. They smooth out ping and may drop ping by a few milliseconds. They also allow you to manage bandwidth used by applications etc, which is quite cool.

I’d say if you are a competitive FPS gamer (goes to LANs etc) then it might be worth considering if you want the best, but generally I’d say they aren’t worth it. If they were around £30 I may consider one.
 
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2006/12/08/gaming_killer_nic/3

Conversely we saw where World of Warcraft players saw very discernible differences that positively impacted their gaming. Our play testing with Thomas and his level 60 character was quite eye opening. He saw real and attributable values associated with the Killer NIC when playing WoW. I would guess that the Killer NIC would likely have impact in other MMPOGs as well. Given that some WoW players spend huge amounts of time inside of the WoW universe, having overall smoother gameplay and actual move and attacking advantages given through the use of the Killer NIC will likely be a no-brainer for many. Even looking at the game as a third party simply observing showed that the game was smoother and more fluid and certainly made it more playable.
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But the review is from 2006 so not really a comparison against current onboard NIC's
 
Ok thanks guys, it's a hard one as I don't have any FPS or ping issues normally. FPS I'm normally never higher than 30ms, MMOs between 30-60 - was going to start going to Lans though!
 
is the difference purely on gaming nics? surely its just the effect of NIC processing being taken off the cpu and onto a dedicated chip. TBH if your CPU cant manage NIC processing it probably cant handle gaming.

Still, hats off the Killer NIC guys duping some big mobo vendors into licensing their product, ROFL
 
It's all bull****. You cannot lower your ping once it's outside your network - when you will already have a ping <1ms...

There's a thread on here where I ask for results using the Killer NIC card, needless to say it didn't improve anything.

Waste of money.
 
.:MBK:. said:
TBH if your CPU cant manage NIC processing it probably cant handle gaming.
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Swifty55 said:
You cannot lower your ping once it's outside your network
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Indeed. Complete waste of money. The vast majority of network performance issues are outside your own network, ie. there's not much you can do about them.

Also, the killer NIC was released when XP was around. Since Vista, the Windows network stack has been completely re-written, and optimized massively - further reducing the "benefit" the killer NIC would provide.
 
Just to follow up, a guy I know has one. He says it's pretty good but can't actually say whether it makes any difference. Just to put it into perspective, he plays CSS at LANs regularly (within top 10 at i-series).

Basically if you are the sort of person that thinks "could I have made that headshot if my gear was a little better?" then you could consider it. Remember that lowering/smoothing your ping at LAN has far more impact than playing online. Again, I wouldn't buy one unless I did loads of downloading whilst gaming.
 
I think that with a modern pc the NIC uses maybe 0.1% CPU power while 5 years ago a NIC maybe used 5% of CPU power.

So maybe a dedicated NIC made some sense in 2006 but not in 2011
 
If you really want to take the TCP/IP processing away from the CPU, just get a decent Intel PRO/1000 NIC and be done with it.

Sod paying over the odds because it has a crappy "gaming" design and a weird name.

If these "killer" NICs were that good, don't you think top-end server manufacturers would be sticking them on-board so that data-critical and response time sensitive applications (where cost isn't a factor, the systems cost tens of thousands anyway) can be delivered with the utmost performance? Odd how they don't isn't it!
 
Sundance said:
Depends. They smooth out ping and may drop ping by a few milliseconds. They also allow you to manage bandwidth used by applications etc, which is quite cool.

I’d say if you are a competitive FPS gamer (goes to LANs etc) then it might be worth considering if you want the best, but generally I’d say they aren’t worth it. If they were around £30 I may consider one.
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most routers do this anyway my gaming router which is probably about 6years old cost less than a "killer nic" and has all the features , i can manually add ip and ports that will get traffic priority etc

it knocks a few MS off my ping but nothing more i wouldnt buy a nic just because its claimed it can help most of it is not under your control it is all of the computers in between you and the WOW servers or whatever you are playing that effect your ping
 
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