Bigfoot introduces the Killer Network Interface card

You think you're a hardcore gamer? Really? If you've been looking for the latest piece of hardware to give yourself the one-up, Bigfoot's got you covered. The aptly named Killer Network Interface card just might be the most unique gamer-centric component we've seen; this amped up gigabit NIC has its own 400Mhz network processing unit, 64MB of dedicated DDR RAM, a USB 2.0 port, and touts itself as one of the first consumer uses of Corporate Network Acceleration Technology. So these CAT6-melting specs have to amount to something, right? Gamers can supposedly expect to see noticeable improvements in first-person shooters as well as consistently lower ping times as the self-proclaimed "LLR Technology" offloads network tasks from the CPU to the Killer's NPU. Although pricing is currently unavailable, the tricked-out NIC will be available starting August 16th; for now we'll reserve judgment about how this thing just screams "overkill" on one of the more basic functions of any computer, and bask in its extravagant frivolity.

[Via Crowdedbrain]

[Ben @ Jul 13th 2006 9:55PM]

wtf?

[Mantrid @ Jul 13th 2006 10:06PM]

Yeah, "WTF" pretty much sums it up.

[Eric M @ Jul 13th 2006 10:10PM]

Verizon Fios (or any fiber optic internet service) > this gimmick.

I live in NJ and my pings to NY servers is usually less than 10. With Comcast I got around 22ms.

[Chris @ Jul 13th 2006 10:23PM]

To be honest i rather see this for my job than my home PC... i run an ISP and offloading the processing of gigabit ethernet links to the network card itself seems awesome... if there drivers really work out the card could be killer and if they price it right.

[PacketMonkee @ Jul 13th 2006 10:30PM]

What a pointless idea.

[Wesley @ Jul 13th 2006 10:36PM]

USB? I'd rather have another gigabit NIC or two.

[johann lo @ Jul 13th 2006 10:40PM]

What a joke. The chokepoint is your WAN connection not your LAN connection to the modem. Your basic $10 fast ethernet NIC is many times faster (bandwidth, latency, u name it) than your WAN link.

idiots

[Steve Wallen @ Jul 13th 2006 10:44PM]

If the pricing is right, sign me up; for our servers at work of course. "Corp" level nics w/ offload engines are expensive as hell.

[jorellh @ Jul 13th 2006 11:14PM]

Basically they are saying that this makes your gaming faster because the CPU has to do less work involving network traffic because it offloads the work to the controller. Much like recent video cards now have GPUs which offload all the video work onto the video card. It is not saying that your network will be faster, just that network games will be more responsive.

[Wry Cooter @ Jul 13th 2006 11:17PM]

Are LAN parties still common? I could see someone using this to host those. Maybe. I'm not that sure what it is

Otherwise, I would think the bottleneck would be the latency inherent in whatever fat pipe the owner is using to connect to the internets thingie.

[scott @ Jul 13th 2006 11:17PM]

LED's, must be better at what it does...

[Evan K @ Jul 13th 2006 11:19PM]

but...why?

[TexRob @ Jul 13th 2006 11:29PM]

Why not offer a cable modem/DSL modem instead, or in addition to this? I could buy that this would benefit you if your cable modem wasn't a bottle neck.

[bswenka @ Jul 13th 2006 11:41PM]

Don't need Cat6 for Gigabit, Cat5e will do just fine.

[Kyle @ Jul 14th 2006 12:28AM]

yes, but can it play DVDs? (chris rock)

[mike @ Jul 14th 2006 12:55AM]

NIC's transferring at broadband speeds use so little CPU power that this thing would be useless. Using this for servers in a datacenter would be crazy too. I doubt they have drivers for W2K3, linux, solaris, etc. I'd take a dual or quad intel gigabit card any day. Plus a server with any processing power wouldn't even notice the loads cause by heavily used NIC's. It's not the network traffic that raises the CPU(s)load, it's the application / process / service using that data which raises the processors usage.

[Lorin @ Jul 14th 2006 1:41AM]

What's great is that apparently you can write your own code to work on the processor, meaning you could have a build-in hardware firewall/packet sniffer/etc...

[Ender @ Jul 14th 2006 2:33AM]

This is complete farce. Latency cannot be reduced, if it takes light 20ms to get from point A to B, this little card will not make it go faster. This looks like nothing other than a gimmick.

[cyberdork @ Jul 14th 2006 2:51AM]

Woah! Anyone know if the card can be overclocked?
I just wish it had a fan!
;-)

[rich @ Jul 14th 2006 2:59AM]

WOOT! yeah baby! i'm beta testing this product, and have three of these in my box right now. it's weird, because my comment i'm posting was already here before i even read the story! WOW! bill and ted here i come!

[DrBuzz0 @ Jul 14th 2006 3:07AM]

Well...I'd really love to put this in my computer. Unfortionately, with my video card, my hardware accelerated sound card, my hardware mpeg1/2/4 decoder, my hardware physics accelerator, my hardware video encoder, my hardware video scaler, my hardware encyrption accelerator, my hardware security card, my hardward raid controler and my hardware compression engine, I simply do not have the room for another PCI card.

Maybe I should get one of those PCI expansion systems. The only problem is that those interfaces can slow stuff down. I think I best get another hardware accelerator to offset that problem.

Does anybody know of any hardware-based accelerators which can search the net and find other hardware-based acclerators to do the various tasks my processor would otherwise need to do???

[Keith L. Dick @ Jul 14th 2006 3:20AM]

As with everything, "I'll believe it When I Actually See It"...

[MiTHRANDiR @ Jul 14th 2006 3:21AM]

How many processing units can we stuff in a PC? :D CPU (x2) + GPU (x4) + PPU (Physics processing unit) + Sound card + That, we're already at 9

[Juaquin @ Jul 14th 2006 3:25AM]

Even on my laptop with wireless g connection, I consistently get pings of 15-20ms when playing Counter Strike on a server all the way across the US on the East Coast, and that's more than fast enough even for the most intense FPS game. Now - if my wireless connection paired with my normal 1.5mbps cable connection can do that, someone explain why i need a dedicated card that will probably cost at least $50?

And I thought networking duties were offloaded to the chipset, not the processor? I doubt you'll see any measurable difference at all with a dedicated networking card.

But nice gimmick.

[Josh @ Jul 14th 2006 6:33AM]

the funny part is the PCI bus can just barely handle Gigabit speeds, so no matter how good the card actually is, it's not going to be that fast if you have any other PCI cards at all.

[Sindri @ Jul 14th 2006 6:44AM]

This clearly works because sharp Klingon blade on the card cuts the ping in half!

[BJP @ Jul 14th 2006 9:12AM]

I am running the beta version of this card and I have to tell you, by using this interface card I actually turned into energy traveled back in time and attended the design meetings. I related your guys concerns and they should have been addressed months ago...

Also I have some exciting news... BIGFOOT is introducing a keyboard with faster keystroke response times!!!!

That's right no waiting around for you lagging keyboard to record each keystroke you can cut response times in half!!!!

[jim @ Jul 14th 2006 9:46AM]

I just get a kick out of this as half of you don't actually see what this card is actualy trying to do.

[chris @ Jul 14th 2006 10:18AM]

(disclaimer, % numbers here are based on a benchmark I saw some time ago, i was unable to find it again so this is approimate and from memory)
a crappy nic, like an older dlink, will use up to 20% or more of your cpu when maxed out on the network. an average nic will use about 15%, and a good nic will still use 5%. I'm not sure game data is capable of maxing out a gigabit nic, but every little bit of cpu usage is a task switch which is power away from the game right? people get dual cpu rigs just to offload system threads to a seperate cpu and dedicate as much cpu as possible to the game engine, so this product fits that user profile very well. these are guys that are eager to buy $10k Dell XPS and Alieanware systems, a $50 NIC that uses less cpu isn't going to make these people flinch.

[E71 @ Jul 14th 2006 10:30AM]

I purchased two x1900 series radeons and all the 2nd one does is improve performance by around 20-30% on my games. You'd expect performance to practically double in this day and age when they provide this dual-gpu solution.

If this network card gimmick is the same sort of crap, someone should really sue.

[Pinkerton @ Jul 14th 2006 10:40AM]

Holy Schmoley, a network card more powerful than a 10 year old computer. My 3C905-TX is developing an inferiority complex.

[John Laur @ Jul 14th 2006 10:44AM]

Yawn.. just an OEM's ToE card with a heatsink slapped on... The funny thing is how they include a USB controller for some unknown reason. That means they have to have a PCIPCI bridge on there which introduces additional latency on the PCI bus.

But anyway as others have said it's really not the NIC that is at fault with most of the latency you see in an online game. Though it may contribute to 1 or 2 ms if it is a really crappy NIC, you have far more latency issues coming up from other sources. I have 15-20ms between my cable modem at home and my ISP's gateway routers; no NIC is helping that.

[Loonie @ Jul 14th 2006 11:35AM]

It doesn't say you will get a better ping. It means your processor will have more time to dedicate to your software, as it doesn't have to worry about the network controller.

You may have heard of this concept before, it's called "hardware acceleration".

The fact it has its own processor and memory gives it flexibility for things like, as someone above mentioned, a hardware firewall. I concur though, it is uncertain how much tangible benefit the average consumer will see. This could be a nice piece of hardware, but they're going to need to get the drivers just right. Not to mention price. It has potential, but it's going to be a hard sell, as most people won't see the need for one, and probably won't *have* the need for one.

The technophile within me is interested to see where this goes. Hardware acceleration = teh good!

[Loonie @ Jul 14th 2006 11:42AM]

Oh, wait, on their site, it does claim a better ping. My mistake. Technically, it may be true, but not enough of one to render it worthwhile. That's not really where the advantage to such a concept would lie, but I guess it's the only one the average consumer would relate to.

It holds true that this is going to be a tough sell...

[Bryan @ Jul 14th 2006 12:05PM]

I wish I could just sink my money into something that could do all this processing centrally.

[BBells @ Jul 14th 2006 12:24PM]

This is what happens when nerds go to business school:

"If Bigfoot can raise more money, it hopes to begin selling NetBlazer by July for $300."

http://money.cnn.com/2005/11/02/news/midcaps/bizplan_fsb_1105/index.htm

[Ryan @ Jul 14th 2006 12:34PM]

TCP offload cards have been around for a long time, this is really nothing new. It also won't make a lick of difference while gaming because the amount of TCP traffic on the PCI bus is dwarfed by the graphics card. Your average game is only doing 10-30 k/s of traffic. That's not significant enough to impact today's hardware in any way at all. Most people are running home routers without gigabit anyway.

TCP offload cards have their uses; namely servers that want to be able to saturate a gigabit link. The big thing that ToE cards do is remove bandwidth from the PCI bus, which makes sense when you're serving a lot of files off disks on the same PCI bus. TCP checksum calculations aren't that complex, it's just that doing 50 million of them per second can eat up a bit of CPU.

[Ted Stevens @ Jul 14th 2006 12:51PM]

Yes, but will this help unclog the tubes to my personal internets? That's what I want to know...

[The Jeremy @ Jul 14th 2006 1:24PM]

Will it do WOT?

(Wake on Torrent)

How about automatic MAC address changes on-the-fly when it detects break-in attempts by the RIAA and the MPAA?

[JP @ Jul 14th 2006 1:32PM]

You guys don't get it,
For gamers every FPS (frame per second) is precious. If this card can buy even 1 or 2, at a reasonable price (or even unreasonable for some fanatics), then it is worth it. Gaming PCs do one thing, and do it really well, offloading any task to an alternate processor is a speed advantage. It is not about the network speed at all, but that does help for LAN parties.

[JP @ Jul 14th 2006 1:43PM]

That USB port must be meant for the few people who connect to their broadband modems with the USB cable. Otherwise its existence baffles me.

[Alex @ Jul 14th 2006 5:11PM]

Whoa whoa whoa... you guys all forgot the most important thing. Does it play Doom?

[James @ Jul 14th 2006 6:02PM]

awesome, ill be sure to get this for my quad graphics card, quad cpu core, 2 terabyte pc setup. seriously that is overkill

[GhostDoggy @ Jul 15th 2006 7:22AM]

If anyone thinks that their network card is the limiting factor in their gaming then they've got other problems to worry about (example: ignorance).

Playing on the Internet means you do not have any control of the quality of service beyond your front door. Doh! This is obviously meant for people with more money than brains.

[Robin @ Jul 17th 2006 3:16AM]

For those who wonders what the USB 2.0 does:

"The USB 2.0 port is part of Bigfoot's Flexible Network Architecture which allows developers to write applications to run on the NIC's processor."

There, Took me 30sec to find on google.

[BobTurbo @ Jul 17th 2006 7:42AM]

And the free steak knives are already welded in.

[yuppicide @ Aug 4th 2006 10:23PM]

This thing is a piece of garbage. They posted some speed tests. For one, they tested World of Warcraft. That game doesn't really need good FPS or a good ping to play.

They posted an 8% increase in FPS and a 10ms to 20ms drop in ping. That is nothing special!

[Tytus @ Aug 12th 2006 12:03AM]

Tytus here (one of the inventors of Killer),

Lots of misconceptions out there about what Killer is and what it does! For example, the USB port is fully acccessable and usable by the LINUX kernel of the Killer card: and users can write their own programs (or download them) that take advantage of it!

More details and answers to other questions in our FAQ Here:
http://www.bigfootnetworks.com/FrequentlyAskedQuestions.aspx

And I'm always eager to answer serious questions here:
http://www.endlagnow.org/ELNForums/

Thanks, Tytus