could this be some missed performance ?

[Poci]

anything under about a 50ms ping is NOT going to have a noticeable impact on your gaming experience. your isp and the location of the servers you're on have far more to do with it than anything else.

as for performance gains you might get by moving the load off the cpu to the nic, couple fps isn't anything amazing for $100+

enthusiasts haven't always been about spending ridiculous amounts of money for better performance. at one time we were also quite frugal as well. overclocking started out as a way of getting FREE extra performance. now it seems whatever money was saved overclocking is spent on extra cooling! i'm guilty of all of this myself, but i don't forget what got me here.

now with enthusiast based mobo's, cooling, and add-in cards everyone is looking to capitalize. that's where these overpriced NICs come into play. they're the snake oil of the modern computing age. yes, sure they'll show a quantifiable performance increase, but it's nothing you'd notice in a double blind test.

being an enthusiast doesn't mean buying into every new technology that promises a few extra 3dmarks.

onto your problem, if you're noticing some sort of lag in 3 different os installs, it's likely something else. why don't you list your hardware and maybe someone can help ya out there?

True, but like someone else said,with todays CPUs they can handle networking operations just fine.
And I think they would be able to handle them even better with improved mobo NIC drivers that are optimized for todays CPUs.

[camster30]

im trying to lower my 73 to 120 ms ping.
im not after any more fps's as i do have a over powered card for the game (TF2)

what i think i was getting at a post or 2 ago is, it seems like no one (almost no one) even looked up the card, or took the time to read and reviews or watch any youtube reviews on it before they slammed the card down.
as for the price, call it my hobby to have my fingers in my system, a 200$/M hobby. adding new hardware, for something newer.
As a mechanic, i see the snake oil idea every day. so i understand it may or may not help any or only help the 5 - 10%. I also look at this in 2 other ways. IF i like the card, it can follow me to future system builds until the day its no longer supported, and if i don't like the card, i can sell the card and/or card and system to any kid at work or where ever. or even give it to one of my kids.

as for this system, but as of this nov the mobo, processer, memory, 1 HD and os will change

XP Home, XP64, Win7
Antec Nine Hundred
AMD Phenom™ II X4 940 Quad-Core Black Edition 3.0GHz w/ 8MB Cache
Zalman CNPS7500-AlCu LED Ultra Quiet CPU Cooler
MSI K9A2 CF http://www.msi.com/index.php?func=pr...1&prod_no=1333
2@ CorsairTWIN2X4096-8500C5 PC2-8500 4GB Kit 5-5-5-15
Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 VAPOR-X 1GB GDDR5
Seagate 250GB Barracuda 7200.10 SATA II w/ NCQ, 16MB Cache
Seagate 500GB Barracuda 7200.11 SATA II w/ NCQ, 32MB Cache
LG SuperMulti DVD Writer 22x SATA, Black, OEM
D-Link GamerLounge Xtreme N Gaming Router

[Brandito]

it's a network card, what is there to be looked at? any motherboard you buy today comes with 1-2 of them onboard. they've served us fine for years, i've never had a problem with ping that couldn't be solved by playing on a closer server.

[CTUnit1]

If the 5 to 6 FPS improvement and the 5ms latency decrease is worth 100 bucks to you, go for it.

As far as enthusiasts go, there is a difference between enthusiasts and people who want to increase their e-peen.

[Poci]

it seems like no one (almost no one) even looked up the card, or took the time to read and reviews or watch any youtube reviews on it before they slammed the card down.

Umm,that would be because we ALREADY know about it and cards like it

lol

[TheGlasMan]

Sorry meant to get back to this post some time ago, but I've been under the weather. Fine now thank goodness! As far as Enthusiasts go there are almost as many types as there are people who care about their computers. Let's not try to define that as we may miss out on some interesting stuff that doesn't fit into a market definition.

I for one did google the board and check out the reviews. From that found out that the card is limited to 10MB throughput. Stated as intentional by the designers as internet speeds never surpass that. Terrible for exchanging data on your home network if you are 100 or GB capable.

It does reduce ping times, but I'm sure that is a result of higher cpu polling, or as a result of not polling the cpu at all for ping (card knows how and responds, faster) the few millesconds will not do much for your lag which is very high. Try tracert etc to find out what the problems are in your path. If it's not your provider then find a closer server. Being pci-e now just makes it more compatible more boards (and of course more cachet).

We've (well many of us) been around (as individuals with computers, personally my first modem was 2400baud and this was a full modem, you needed a 100MH cpu for winmodems a few years in the future) a long time here and have bitten, sometimes hard on many wonderful seeming gadgets so we may be more conservative then some groups. So when you join us here remember to cut us a little slack.

As to your original post, yes, if you have the money there is a little missed performance out there, there always is. If you have a budget you need to judge the opportunity (what else you can do with the money) costs.♠

im trying to lower my 73 to 120 ms ping.
im not after any more fps's as i do have a over powered card for the game (TF2)

what i think i was getting at a post or 2 ago is, it seems like no one (almost no one) even looked up the card, or took the time to read and reviews or watch any youtube reviews on it before they slammed the card down.
as for the price, call it my hobby to have my fingers in my system, a 200$/M hobby. adding new hardware, for something newer.
As a mechanic, i see the snake oil idea every day. so i understand it may or may not help any or only help the 5 - 10%. I also look at this in 2 other ways. IF i like the card, it can follow me to future system builds until the day its no longer supported, and if i don't like the card, i can sell the card and/or card and system to any kid at work or where ever. or even give it to one of my kids.

as for this system, but as of this nov the mobo, processer, memory, 1 HD and os will change

XP Home, XP64, Win7
Antec Nine Hundred
AMD Phenom™ II X4 940 Quad-Core Black Edition 3.0GHz w/ 8MB Cache
Zalman CNPS7500-AlCu LED Ultra Quiet CPU Cooler
MSI K9A2 CF http://www.msi.com/index.php?func=pr...1&prod_no=1333
2@ CorsairTWIN2X4096-8500C5 PC2-8500 4GB Kit 5-5-5-15
Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 VAPOR-X 1GB GDDR5
Seagate 250GB Barracuda 7200.10 SATA II w/ NCQ, 16MB Cache
Seagate 500GB Barracuda 7200.11 SATA II w/ NCQ, 32MB Cache
LG SuperMulti DVD Writer 22x SATA, Black, OEM
D-Link GamerLounge Xtreme N Gaming Router

[camster30]

I for one did google the board and check out the reviews. From that found out that the card is limited to 10MB throughput. Stated as intentional by the designers as internet speeds never surpass that. Terrible for exchanging data on your home network if you are 100 or GB capable..

well... thats strange. mine says its connected at 1gb/s. I've try ed moving a 700mb movie and it moved it in under a min. (laptops not gigabit) ill play more with that part after i figure out game mode who ever you read must not have turned off the game mode or something

It does reduce ping times, but I'm sure that is a result of higher cpu polling, or as a result of not polling the cpu at all for ping (card knows how and responds, faster) the few millesconds will not do much for your lag which is very high. Try tracert etc to find out what the problems are in your path. If it's not your provider then find a closer server. Being pci-e now just makes it more compatible more boards (and of course more cachet)..

i wasn't worried about cpu polling. i was after the fact this card took away the network handling from windows. so now with 30 people playing, in a area that has alot of action, i am not getting any jerking from my system waiting to get game packets from windows putting them in a buffer. and as for finding a closer server, whats wrong with finding a way to play better with the same group of people i have been for 3 years. i've try'ed the tracert befor. and still the same. 11 hops to the server. the biggest problem is my wonderfull isp makes 2 hops west befor it gose east.

there is a differance in game play from a silly card. you'd just have to try it. but yes, there is a noticable differance in game play. but i bet no one will even think about it, so i guess this thred is done.

[Meridian]

Benchmarks?



M

[Brandito]

Benchmarks?



M

i honestly doubt we'll get anything valuable at this point. even if it bursts into flames it's likely going to be a good thing

[camster30]

you'll get your benchmarks in a day or 2


and just so I get what you want to satisfy, what benchmark programs do you want, screenshots, ect.

[Meridian]

I think we'd like to see something which backs up this:

there is a differance in game play from a silly card. you'd just have to try it. but yes, there is a noticable differance in game play.

It will probably need to be a FRAPS run or similar on a game to show the change in frame-rate that you appear to be claiming.


M

[jdabbs]

I've yet to see a review acknowledge the existence of network-side QoS when evaluating Killer NIC performance.

While the Killer NIC shows a 0-x% improvement in latency, it's likely a similar improvement would occur if their network was configured properly, and for all devices.

[Windrunner]

I don't mean to rub it in too much, but the killer NICs actually DECREASE thoroughput performance over most integrated NICs. They do help intranet latency somewhat, but for thoroughput you get about a tenth of what you'd normally get over gigabit.

It'd be a better idea to get an old rig with an integrated gigabit NIC, strap a gigabit NIC to it, and set it up on www.clarkconnect.com linux, then drop a gigabit switch behind it. It'll do more than the NIC. You should look up the hardware specs of your router. DD-wrt has a good listing of router specs. http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices

I'm pretty certain that if your router can't handle the traffic you're pulling through it in a timely manner, you could have as big a NIC as you wanted and it wouldn't matter.

If you REALLY want to eliminate bottlenecks and spend money needlessly, switch to 40GBPS fiber. All the microsoft techs are doing it.


Edit: For that matter, has anyone ever seen a NIC with an on board processor that helps with thoroughput? Even from a RAMdisk I can't get past 60 MiB/s without hitting 100% CPU usage on my single core systems.

Edit 2: Besides the $500 ones that look terrifying? LOL