Online game performance - Monster NIC

jont999 · 11 Sep 2007 at 14:46

I've been reading mixed reviews about the Monster NIC card that optimises your network connection for improved online game performance. Instead of throwing money at the problem is there a way to improve performance by configuring Windows (I've got XP and Vista) and are there programs other than TCP Optimizer that can help?

Also I'm using the motherboards lan connection, but would I see any improvement from using a dedicated network card?

thanks!

marc2003 · 11 Sep 2007 at 15:00

just stick with what you have. there is no way a "monster nic" is going to offer any tangible benefit.

same goes for tweaks - i might be wrong but i doubt it very much. the most important factor of course is your isp.

Chronictank · 12 Sep 2007 at 00:09

only improvement you would see is less load on your cpu as the tcp/ip stack is processed on the card instead of the cpu
There is negligble difference between standard pci and on-board nic's as both use windows to process, therefore put roughly the same load on the cpu

dun · 12 Sep 2007 at 00:24

Simple answer... save you money

Alexrose1uk · 12 Sep 2007 at 01:01

If I read the right reviews, for one of the killer NICS there was a tangible benefit from having the card IF problems werent being caused by your ISP, but the benefits varied and were different on each game using them. I think it was a combo of an effective extra pc on the NIC, and a more efficient linux OS on the card that was causing the benefit. The difference was usually a small improvement to ping and an increase to fps due to more efficient internet interpretation and cpu workload being reduced by the card taking over.

Basically the cards were semi decent and showed promise, and the fnaapps were interesting and worked pretty well, but they werent worth the £100-200 they were retailing for, although I believe the second version of the killer NIC was better than the first.

azzerz · 20 Nov 2007 at 12:22

bought one from OcUK last week

made 0% difference and left me with 300down for normal desktop duties

got 20mb cable from virgin... i constantly get 19down and 735 up

tbh, if it had made only 5ping differnece i would have kept it... but it really made no difference at all

DOES have really cool LED's though, theres an option to have them blinking or steady... really cool.

thats just what it did for me... might be different for others.

jont999 · 20 Nov 2007 at 12:26

azzerz said:
bought one from OcUK last week

made 0% difference and left me with 300down for normal desktop duties

got 20mb cable from virgin... i constantly get 19down and 735 up

tbh, if it had made only 5ping differnece i would have kept it... but it really made no difference at all

DOES have really cool LED's though, theres an option to have them blinking or steady... really cool.

thats just what it did for me... might be different for others.

Hmm, maybe it's a config issue, I know one of the mags had a really big issue getting it going. Spoken to Bigfoot about it? They're support is supposed to be pretty good.