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» MEDIA (2) Ping Rate FPS Rate

Get ready for it, its the moment you've all been waiting for. Drum roll please... its the review of the Bigfoot Killer NIC....

Well for one, how does this card work, you may ask. Well unlike most modern network cards, like your onboard network on your motherboard, (your board does have at least an onboard right?)the Killer comes packing with its own dedicated processor. A 32 bit, 400MHz Freescale processor, to be exact.

Now with that bad boy under the hood, you should expect to see big gains on your performance and for your CPU's work load to be lighten right? Well... it does. But any performance gains are negligible. I mean, at least I couldn't tell.

For one, let it be emphasized that in modern video games any bottleneck lies in the video card. Not the CPU. Don't believe me? Play World of Warcrafton a 955D with a 7950 GX2 and play it again on a Core 2 Duo or a Xeon 3xxx series using onboard (bleh, that just disgusts me so much. The things I do for you guys...).

Now back to the NIC. In my hardcore tests, I saw a frame rate increase of about 3 to 11.5 percent when comparing to two identical machines (E6600 and a Xeon 3060, stock speeds, running DDR2 800 at 2GB each, both using 7950GX2's) first using Asus's onboard network controller, then using a D-Link DTX NIC. The Killer, only produced marginally better results.

Now what about the oh so mighty ping drops you are to expect from the $280 monster? This is where this card shines.

In addition to removing the burden (note: however small) of networking of the CPU, the card actually provides a more efficient, optimized networking stack than what is shipped with Windows XP. I saw a consistently lower ping rate then the exact same machine, without the Killer.
Now this sounds all well and good right? Right? Well, sorta. The ping drop was only 5ms lower than the non-Killer machine. No detectable difference between the two machines in the test.

Now with that super processor on that card you have ample opportunity for cheaters. You know, remove the separate machine needed for a lot of your cheating?
Something must be said about Bigfoot's "Ping Control", a feature that lets you increase your ping so that you are on a level playing field with non-Killer equipped players say in, the boondocks of the backwoods, of the hill country in the Boondocks. My question? What the heck for? I spent $300 on this thing so I could get the godlike advantage over this hillbilly, not to give it to him.

All that aside, this 400MHz processor has me drooling though. You can run CPU hogging apps on the card with the processor and the Linux OS on the card. Teamspeak anyone? Better yet, run your anti virus program on the card instead of your main processor.

The conclusion of all things is... spend your money else where. The only people that I can see benefiting from this would be people running older single core CPU's. And there is a limit to that. My old Pentium 2 wouldn't even support the NIC, so any chance of testing on that was reduced to nil. But even if you are running, say, a AMD 3800+ 939, wouldn't the money be better spent on a better component, like a 4000+ X2, or a ATI XT1900 XTor NVIDIA 7600GT, or better, faster RAM instead?

The Ninja gives it a 6.5 out of 10. Don't waste your time here.