is a gameing network card worth getting?

because it's gimmicky hardware that doesn't make the electricity firing down the wires connecting you to other folk go any faster
 
There's been a few reviews/tests done and it makes very little to no difference (1-2ms), and these tests were a few years ago so now it should make even less difference now.

Just googled it and the same company are still going and even have a new product so somebody must be buying this stuff :eek:

Personally I wouldn't spend £100 just to get 2ms better ping.
 
they can only speed up or make more efficient local

in your house you have 1 router, 10ft of cable - this bit can be speeded up

outside your house you have

100's of miles of wire, stacks of routers and other comms equipment, as well as hubs and switches in the data center

you may be able to shave off 0.2ms ping to your local router but the other 100ms you ahve no control over
 
edscdk said:
you may be able to shave off 0.2ms ping to your local router but the other 100ms you ahve no control over
Click to expand...

Exactly. These things are an enormous waste of money. They can only improve your network performance between your computer and your router. From there, you're at the mercy of the internet. A 'killer NIC' can't do anything about latency and traffic on the web.

If you want to improve your gaming, spend the money on a bigger monitor, a graphics upgrade or some decent multi-channel speakers.
 
They largely depend on what machine you're putting it into and what your doing at the time. The main benefit I see is that it off loads all the TCP to the nic itself away from the CPU. This is good for busy networks with over run cpu's. Now that dual core is common and nics on motherboards are getting better the returns are minimal.

Cheap nics for instance will not match a intel pro1000 for instance, it really depends on what you want.

I'd expect on a single core machine running an intensive cpu online game to have maybe 1 or 2 more FPS but also much more constant network connection.
 
ecksmen said:
I'd expect on a single core machine running an intensive cpu online game to have maybe 1 or 2 more FPS but also much more constant network connection.
Click to expand...

Does anyone who's serious about gaming still use a single-core CPU? And if they did, wouldn't it be a much better use of money to upgrade to an inexpensive dual-core than to buy an expensive NIC?

Also, what do you mean by a 'more constant' network connection? I can't say I've ever seen a standard NIC drop a connection.
 
Mattus said:
Does anyone who's serious about gaming still use a single-core CPU? And if they did, wouldn't it be a much better use of money to upgrade to an inexpensive dual-core than to buy an expensive NIC?

Also, what do you mean by a 'more constant' network connection? I can't say I've ever seen a standard NIC drop a connection.
Click to expand...

I've already said returns are minimal on modern dual core pcs.

If the CPU is busy processing a thread for an online game its possible for users to experience perceived "lag"; a cheap nic which does all the calculations in software via the cpu (such as CRC error checks) suffers more so than a decent nic with CRC checking on the card. The killer nic goes even further and takes all the load off the CPU and IIRC runs linux on board.

A lot of cheap gigabit network cards can not push anywhere near gigabit speeds, again due to the software required to power them.

As I said for the home user now with modern computers there's little point IMO but then I would never suggest using a cheap £10 nic. You get what you pay for.
 
kain666 said:
so from your feedback it is better to get a cpu upgrade than buying an expensive nic
Click to expand...

SMP offers a lot of advantages over a single core. With cheap software based nics the CPU is more important, but then it depends upon the quality of the drivers as well as I'm sure there are cheap nics with brilliant software drivers do exsist, but I'm yet to find one.

I would recommend getting a nic with TCP off load, which needn't be expensive as a killer nic but likewise I wouldn't expect:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=NW-084-EX&groupid=46&catid=1597&subcat=

to have it.
 
Just about every NIC built into motherboards for the past 8 years has support IP checksum and TCP checksum offloading. It's not a big deal.

The thing that most onboard NIC's don't yet support is the TCP Chimney Offload feature. This is big deal for Hyper-V systems. It's not a big deal for a modern multi-core desktop PC.


The whole purpose a NIC device driver (technically known by Windows software developers as a "NDIS" driver) is to advertise and implement support of its special features to the Windows OS so that it can use them. Therefore all that these "gaming network cards" are is:

- A fancy PCB and shiny heatsink
- A decent/high-end network interface controller chipset that supports quite a few desirable hardware acceleration features
- A NDIS driver that exposes the vast majority of what the chipset supports to the OS
- Nice shiny packaging.

All the marketing FUD about "oh our gaming network card will bypass the 'slow' Windows network stack" is complete bullcrap. They do nothing of the sort, and to suggest such a thing is totally moronic.

Therefore, if performance is what you're after. Just buy a high-end Intel network card for £30-40. It will do everything these silly "gaming" branded cards do. And at least you will be sure the NDIS driver is stable, tested and highly optimised. Rather than being written by some niché company in a shed.
 
Just another way for vendors to brand a piece of hardware which wont see you any more gain than a standard piece of kit.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom