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Killer NIC K1 and Custom BitTorrent Client Tested
NetworkingNed writes "The new Killer NIC K1 is the successor to the much debated original Killer NIC card that offers the same features at a lower price: this time for about $170 or so. Not cheap, that's for sure. But in this review at PC Perspective, not only is the new card tested under the drastically updated Vista networking stack with improved results, but the free BitTorrent client that runs on the Killer NIC is reviewed as well; with it you should be able to download torrents without affecting online gaming performance. Enough to warrant a $175 network card?"
Yes. Yes it is. Out there are people willing to spend money on gold-plated scart connectors. I say the more overhyped, overpriced pieces of junk on the market to separate these fools and their cash the better.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
The NIC has its own processor, will run a Bit Torrent client and save to its own USB drive.
But will it run Linux?One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
If you're so worried about bittorrent degrading your performance, save your money - haul out that "obsolete" 1-2ghz machine and you won't have to leave your main box running (and costing electricity) when you seed.
$170 for an embedded (Coldfire?) computer on a PCI card is not that much, and it could actually be useful for other tasks like monitoring, logging and administration. The on-board FPGA could also be used to offload some processing jobs, but it probably doesn't have too many gates.
Why not just setup a test network with a workstation with that NIC, a test server, a sniffer and some test scripts?
You image the workstation so you can start clean with each NIC you're testing.
You use the sniffer so you can see what is actually on the wire.
You use the scripts instead of doing anything manually because you want to remove the human factor as much as possible.
YES! Those are all the reasons why you run your own test server instead of adding additional variables to a test. So, are you going to do the test correctly?
I guess not. Even with knowing every reason NOT to do that, you went ahead anyway.
So what I'm wondering is why haven't we seen any REAL evaluations by people who know what they're doing? Do the Killer NIC people simply refuse to provide hardware to anyone who has a clue?
So you didn't even bother to test against a mid-range card? You used the chip on your motherboard.
That's why you would use a sniffer.
And, once again, you didn't even go out and pick up a $50 NIC to compare it against.
That's why you script the tests.
And that didn't tell you something?
Seriously, you didn't test against a $50 NIC?
"It's not going to save any electricity. You rather have 2 boxes on while you're gaming instead of one, and while you're not gaming you still have one sucking electricity. There's no real energy savings here.
You might game for an hour or two, and download/seed for 24 - for 22 of those hours, your main box is off and not using electricity - and its more than likely that you can run the older box headless, saving even more juice; also that the video card in the older box doesn't run as hot ...
Just get one of these. An external hard drive with built-in wireless networking and a built-in bittorrent client. No computer needed to download.
Set it up, let it leach off of an unsecured wireless network until the owner catches on, then switch to another one. No DMCA letters (at least not to YOUR door), and gaming performance on *your* network won't suffer at all!
Yes, that's bad in several ways. But it's still an interesting/funny thought!
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
That's the whole point of the Killer NIC : It *does run* Linux.
The whole story can be broiled down to the Killer NIC being in fact a nice small router with loadbalancing/QoS/Pcket prioritizing. Plus a small server with it own mass storge pugable in USB.
The Killer NIC is nothing more than a glorified router shrinked to the size of a PCI card.
Once you get the basic idea there are only two quirks :
- It is sold completly ready to go. Whereas
- As this is a PCI card and not a box that must communicated of the internet, the driver can use special hooks and directly tap into the Windows TCP/IP stack. Thus the router can sort and select packaets before they even leave the computer. Thus joe's gaming traffic gets put in front with higher priority than the traffic generated by the dozen of spywares/trojans/virus/spam zombies running in background.
Basically it's targeted to the same people who need quad-core CPUs : geeks who want to hack it, and clueless users who need to still have performance even when everthing is crawling under the load of crapware.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Killer NIC? Is this anything like the EtherKiller?
I've always wondered if there was a world-wide conspiracy with NICs and key points on the net. Naturally, if you wanted to analyze all traffic that existed (yes, yes... imagine the CPU power required for that!) the place one would start would be the NIC!
I'm just referring to packets that are tagged, and when the packets are tagged as such, the NIC effectively ignores them if not specifically destined for its MAC (making same packets impossible to detect even with a hub and another box with a same nic). One could have NICs send out detailed, compressed data concerning addresses and ports, and perhaps even a complete duplicate dump of data being sent to a specific host, if requested remotely.
Now sure, this is the ultimate in paranoia. First, you would require complete complacency on the part of those designing NIC chips, and in many cases this is even done by contracted IC Design firms. There are just too many people involved to have some form of high level conspiracy, allowing for the ultimate in government control.
However, we now have a NIC that is effectively a machine of its own, making it inordinately simple for all sorts of black hat shenanigans. Even if one were to trust the company, a card like this, if exploitable remotely, would be great to set up a nice little monitoring station and even a spam relay on. How would you detect it, if you're a simple user and you don't have another Linux box or firewall to detect the traffic outgoing? Firewalls are also effectively useless (unless in a locked down state that few put them in) once a box is allowed access to NAT. There are simple ways to punch holes through firewall, and using NAT, keep them open with little traffic.
Of course, one could also just phone home every few hours anyhow.
Frankly, while I *like* real hardware NICs, I at least trust that Intel's 100% hardware NIC is going to be relatively unexploitable. It's a single purpose device, so you're not going to be (I hope!) easily loading a trojan on there.
This thing however? It sounds like you could load anything on that "NIC".
Stay away. We don't even know anything about this *company*, let alone it's security review process for the software running the NIC.
Well, UDP traffic is rather important for all of us who use NFS heavily. I haven't seen any Linux drivers for it, though (that doesn't mean they don't exist).
But a NIC with a CPU and memory that offloads the CPU and increases speed isn't new at all -- the existing cards just haven't been hyped up as much. The real question here is how the KillerNIC holds up to the already available cards that offer this, like the 3com 990 series, which has been out on the market for some 5-6 years now.
Another good question is how it, being 100 Mbps, will hold up compared to 1000 Mbps solutions. Since you can get a decent Intel Gigabit NIC for four machines plus a Gigabit switch for the same price as this one card, that's definitely a valid question.
Regards,
--
*Art
Seconded - the thermal footprint of an average P3 after replacing the disks with modern ones is in the sub-50W range. The CPU depending on the model consumes 18-27W at max utilisation, disks are at most 10W each and peripherals rack up 10W or so on top of that. This is comparable to the thermal footprint of a 1GHz+ mini-ITX which is about as low as you can get with modern x86 hardware.
Compared to that a modern gaming capable system runs happily into the 400W+ territory. Even with all the advances in power saving modes on the peripherals and the CPU you are likely to find running an old P3 for router/firewall/P2P/file server/etc considerably more efficient compared to allocating these resources on your "main" box.
The only problem is the scarcity of CPU fans for P3s. There are none on the market. Athlon heatsinks/coolers for the older socket format often need cutting bits off and are also getting rare, so finding a suitable set to refurbish an old box may prove extremely challenging.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Yup, every thing they stamp "Gaming" on its 2x the price (or more in this case) just to RIP YOU OFF. Box sets, RIP OFF Gaming hardware, RIP OFF and more flimsey CPU "G" brands on Dell hardware, RIP OFF and you arnt covered by WARRANTY for OCing anyway. STOP paying the GAMING tax! dammit.
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
<tinfoil>So you'll buy from the company the NSA would bother to target for subversion, rather than the no-account shop who flies under their radar. You fool, you fool.</tinfoil>
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The only Etherkiller I know is
http://www.fiftythree.org/etherkiller/
No clue why you got modded -1, it's a good question. Most consumer-grade routers suck.
:)
Look into DD-WRT or a similar "aftermarket firmware" on a compatible router. I suggest the Buffalo WHR-G54S - Cheap ($50 at Circuit City, $43 or so shipped from NewEgg) and fully compatible with DD-WRT.
The problem is not the CPU speed, but the fact that many routers have too small of an ip_conntrack table (or the equivalent if they do not run Linux). DD-WRT lets you bump up the size of that table and decrease the idle connection timeout time. Boom, most common router problem fixed. (No clue why no manufacturer does this... It's not like an extra 512 entries in the table really takes up that much more memory.)
It also lets you prioritize traffice, dumping BitTorrent (or whatever you choose) traffic to the lowest priority. I can run all the BitTorrent I want and never affect any games.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?