I posted elsewhere on the forum that i had just bought one of these and that it cost around the £170-£180 mark...I also said that I would post a mini-review, so here it is...

I won't say much about the look of the card as I did post a photo of it on the other thread and it is, after all, a network card and not the Starship Enterprise. Having said that, it does have a striking big silver aluminium heatsink in the flashy shape of the Killer' K' logo. (And I think it needs this as it does get very hot)

It installs in a PCI slot and the backplate has a single NIC socket for your network cable to be connected from your modem or router.

The backplate also includes a single USB port (more on that later)...

In the box, you simply get the card, a network cable that is pretty bog standard (I'm actually using one I already had), the installation CD, and a thin installation guide booklet. The same document is on the CD as is a more detailed user guide.

The CD contains drivers for XP and Vista 32 and 64bit flavours but it doesn't auto-detect or have aslick menu - you have to just explore the disk and select the correct setup.exe for your OS.

Installation is supposed to be simple....just open the case, plug the card into a vacant PCI slot and secure the backplate... ...oops...this is where I started to come unstuck . The backplate didn't fit as neatly as i had hoped so when in place and screwed down, the network socket was just a little obscured at its base. You probably know that these things need to be very clearly accesible to the plug or things may not be properly detected, so I had to play around until i got it seated well enough. At this price, I would have expected a little more attention to the socket position (Of many other cards I've installed, none have fitted poorly).

Anyway, once I got the card in and plugged in the router and network cable, I put the disk in, found the Vista 32bit exe file and ran it. ...

The driver install is then automated, but the process also includes the upgrading of the card's firmware. I'm guessing that they aren't yet making them with firmware already vista-ready....but who knows? This can take several minutes.

Eventually, but after a great deal of installing and uninstalling, I got the thing to work...but it wasn't as straightforward as I was led to believe by the many reviews I read, so may be I was doing something wrong...I don't want to blame the card or the makers without strong evidence

Results...
I tried the card using UT3, FEAR multiplayer and COD4 multi-player (just bought).
In UT3, At first I wasn't sure there was much difference and found myself miss-timing quite a few shots, but very quickly settled down and felt that I could be much more 'relaxed' about the flow of the game. Framerates improved slightly (but not greatly, though that could change on other servers). I also noticed more servers with lower ping in the server browser. (Note: I play all these games at 1920x1200 with the highest setting possible, so I give the machine a good workout).

In FEAR, the game definitely ran smoother and there were many more lower ping ones in the browser. A slight lag disadvantage that I had felt previously seemed to have gone...I am very new to that game, but with the Killer NIC card, it was much more like off-line play.

In COD4...I had not tried this properly without the Killer, so i can't compare. However, the game ran superbly at very high spec and with 20+ people all blowing the hell out of each other with smoke and other effects onscreen at all times. One big problem though was getting into servers to play...an issue that relates to Activision's setup to play games through firewalls. Took some tweaking but when I did get in, it was awesome.

The USB socket on the backplate?...
That allows you to plug an external USB hard disk and download torrents, for example, whilst online in a game or other high bandwidth application. The card takes all the processing away from your CPU.

It has it's own firewall and there are other applications emerging that can be downloaded from the Bigfoot site as the are created.

The Bigfoot site has a forum and I used this to get some great advice on technical support issues.

I need to do more longer-term tests and check framerates and pings properly, but overall and so far I am very pleased...but that might be because COD4 online is so fantastic anyway that the card don't matter

Thanks for the review 1nt!

I have to be honest, I'm pleasantly surprised it made such a difference - but the socket position is a bit of poor work from Bigfoot.

The built in firewall sounds like a handy feature, does it have a local network address for you to configure it directly on the card?

I wouldn't say there is a vast difference and it's variable, but time will tell. I think I should have to say that the benefits would probably not justify that price tag.

On the Firewall...I ended up turning it off because when it was on it hid my router icon and I couldn't get in to change properties etc. It's easily switched on and off though. I'm not sure but i think the card's address defaults as 192.168.0.3. But i don't know enough about these things to be sure.

(Next mini-review will hopefully be of my U2-UFO case...I got an email to say it's being requested from the US builders:thumb

i belive the Killer NIC, is suppose to make you games smoother if you are download while you play. It looks like it doesnt do much if you have a decent connection..... but what if you tested it on a slower connection?

Alf, the card has a USB port on the backplate. This allows you to plug any USB drive into it and download torrent files straight onto the disk, thereby removing pressure on the CPU - all the pressure and related processing is taken away from the internal drives and CPU, so it doesn't impact on your connection. It comes with a bittorrent application called FNA specifically to handle this. Downloading has no noticeable impact on multiplayer gaming at all.

Did you notice any benifits to using killer NIC?
or
IS there any benifit?

Yes...definite benefits in FEAR online in terms of ping and smoother gameplay. Also, in COD4 I sometimes find players looking like they are moving in slomo, but i can move normally and easily kill them (Not like heavy lag where everyone seems to be running on the spot). Good for downloading whilst playing online too.