If you read just one more sentence in this post, read the next one: This $300 network interface card is powered by a huge fucking "K" that lowers ping, so gamers can track their quarry across the 'net more effectively.
Gerry Block, the mohawked playboy of the IGN crew, whose blog has headlines like " I'm going to the 40th Anniversary Star Trek Convention in Vegas!" gives us his take over 10,000 words, and two separate two page reviews. We've read, so you don't have to!
New LLR (Lag and Latency Reduction) technology promised lower pings to any server, and MaxFPS technology promised to remove network traffic burden off the CPU in order to more fully dedicate it to working on game-performance.
Way to bury the lead. You forgot to mention the Klingon knife, dude. Jump for the best excerpts from the review.
Like the real modems vs. "win" modems of old (go ask your dad if you don't remember), the
Killer NIC ... bypass the Windows networking stack. This means, in theory, that the CPU comes under no load for network processing...Cutting Windows' UDP protocols out of the loop also has the potential to lower latency between user and game server.
How?
400Hhz Network Processing Unit (NPU), backed up by 64MB of onboard RAM
What else can it do?
...you'll have your own little LINUX computer running along in the bowels of your PC...interesting applications [can] be developed by the user community. Firewalls and anti-virus software could run on the NPU and screen network traffic before Windows even gets close to it. The Killer NIC also has its own USB 2.0 port, which expands its capabilities even more. A BitTorrent client designed for the NPU could run on the card and use an external USB hard drive for storage, which would make it invisible as far as Windows is concerned. Thanks to the Killer NIC's traffic prioritization capabilities, users will conceivably be able to play the most demanding games while using extra bandwidth for BitTorrent, without any performance hits due to BitTorrent CPU load or hard drive access. There are also plans for voice-chat clients designed for the NPU that'll work with USB headsets to take even more load off the CPU.
That was a big paragraph. Sorry. But it was clearly written, now, wasn't it? Good job, Gerry!
How about some satisfaction? Here's the money shot!
The improvement with the Killer NIC was noticeable and impressive. Pings to server dramatically improved, generally ranging from 17-50ms, averaging [a] 45ms [improvement]. FPS also got a nice bump, jumping our average from 74 to 86 fps.
So, he means to say that it works.
Jerry's verdict? He makes us wait a day...
Stay tuned for tomorrow's full benchmarking and final review.
Only to leave us hanging
Assigning a final score to the Killer NIC at this point in time does not seem appropriate, as we would like to spend more time comparing head-to-head performance figures for more games.
Here, we'll loan you our balls and give it a score for you: On a 10 point scale, seems it earns a 9 for innovation, performance, and the "K" knife inside. (Only missing the perfect score due to price)