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Killer NIC Hands-On Testing
basscomm writes "IGN has gotten their hands on the 'Killer' NIC recently mentioned here on Slashdot and have written a two part article detailing their impressions: 'The performance boost we got out of the Killer NIC in this testing exceeds Bigfoot Networks' own claims of 10-15% gains by a long shot and certainly seems to validate the potential of the technology. We suspect, however, that the fact that these computers were marginal at running F.E.A.R. in the first place had an impact in the comparison. In many cases the non-Killer NIC machine became absolutely bogged down as particles flew and grenades exploded, enough so that the entire machine would hang for a moment as things got sorted out. Obviously this murdered average fps figures.'"
The whole point of the thing is **there is no OS TCP/IP stack**.
The whole networking stack runs directly on the card. 100% of all networking load is offloaded from your main CPU onto the CPU on the card.
It is **supposed** to 'intercept incoming 'ping' requests and respond from it's TCP/IP stack immediately'.
That or a server-class Intel dual gigabit port NIC which is essentially the same product (onboard NPU) but not with the fancy heatsink.
Good luck finding a modern gaming motherboard with a vacant PCI slot if you already have a seperate sound card and Agea PHYSX card since most gaming boards (SLI, etc) have 2 or 3 pci slots and usually one is unusable as it is being covered by the video card.
THis card is nowhere near worth it unless you're a linux junkie who suprisingly has money to burn.
Previewing comments are for sissies!
>>I'm getting times of roughly 0.135ms... that's 135 micro-seconds. How in the hell is there any way to improve that?
Oh, I dunno... maybe responding in 134 microseconds or less?
I have a few wanting networks that are big enough to demand some speed but small enough not to be able to justify some of the expense. When I fist started looking into speed issues on one of them, we noticed that a simple 3com 3c905b or better nic instead of the netgear or onboard cards helped quit a lot. People don't really think something as simple as a NIC or even sound card can rob performance from an otherwise good performing computer. As a matter of fact, perceptual increases were noticed by the users. One increase was a quickbooks file that has grown to over 100 megs(at the time of the switch, it is now over 200 meg) that used to take almost 2 minutes to open over the network now opens in less then one. Windows 2000 Domain logon time decreased emensly too which is a life saver for one department were two computers are shared with over 10 different employees who only need to use it for around 10 minutes at a time 2 or 3 times a day.
At around $100 currently for a new "good network card" that is sufficient for more then surfing the interweb and checking email in the office, this card wouldn't be too off the mark for business uses. I would like to see some numbers on simple office tasks like domain logons, opening large files in an already process intensive app (quick books?). I'm not sure I would spec it out in a barand new machine but spending $300 on a NIC instead of $6-800 on a new computer might be well worth it. Currently we are upgrading P4 1.5 gig machines with around 512 megs ram because of the owners instistance on spending as little as possible on a few applications that grow large networked files quickly and already tax the computers with snappy visual pizzaz.
It makes sence that a good network card would increase the performance of game play. I've noticed it with office situations. If this has the ability to increae performance in office situations at the savings of buying new computers to battle the ever increasing bloat that seems impossible to avoid with a limited budget, I would say it is a winner.
BTW, you can usualy find used 3com 3c905b or c NICs for around $20 or so. Try one against your existing $20 NIC and i would bet you will see increased download speeds as well as better loading of larger sites on your broadband conection. I remeber at a lan party once, I was the last to start the download of a patch from a SMB share and the first to apply it because I had a good network card and my file transfer finished first. One guy was seriously pissed because he just built some outragously expensive gamming rig and tryed to claim the problem was because windows XP isn't compatible with linux file servers. Of course I just nodded and acted like he told me something new aND interesting. I didn't even bother to mention that most the games we were going to play were being hosted on a linux game server. There is more to a computer then just processor and video cards.
This is a pretty cool concept - a self-contained VM in hardware to handle your whole networking stack.
This is not a new concept; it's called TOE (TCP Offload Engine) and is a standard feature of high-end networking cards (especially 10GigE cards.) The problem with TOE is that it completely screws up a *properly written* OS TCP stack, which is why the Linux networking people have pushed back strongly on it (the Windows ones might have as well, I don't know.)
Intel is now pushing something called IOAT (I/O Acceleration Technology) which is less aggressive than TOE, and can be properly integrated with the network stack.
Oh, yes, and it's well-known in the cluster community that TOE is bad for network latency.
A TOE is exactly that, a TCP Offload Engine. I tis not a replacement for a networking stack - what it does is assists in the constructoion and destruction of packets in the TCp protocol. it doe snothing for other protocols, such a UDP, ICMP, IGMP, etc.
This card is a complete top to bottom stack (as complete as Linux's stack is, since it *is* Linux's stack). The host OS's networking layer is totally bypassed and all commands are given to the card's stack. It's not really the same thing as TOE at all.