Killer NICs Comes to Laptops

Bigfoot Networks has decided to bring their Killer NICs to the laptop world. Killer Wireless-N will come in two flavors: a 1103 (at 450 Mbps) and 1102 (at 300 Mbps). They will comply with all Wireless IEEE standards (a/b/g/n), though I see no reason to support a or b in a higher end gaming laptop. The interesting part comes from the software that accompanies all Killer Network adapters.

The Killer software is designed to work with the network card to completely off load all network related tasks to the Killer NIC instead of the Windows Network Stack and your CPU. This will free up clock cycles your CPU can then dedicated to other tasks such as physics or rendering the lastest games.

The Killer network adapters, including this new addition, give priority to VOIP and game packets while it lowers or completely shuts off any software updates, IM server pings, torrents, etc. While I understand the principle behind their software and how it should improve your latency, past reviews have revealed an issue.

I have some experience with the original Killer NIC, but my computer is a drastically different animal now. I would like to see a review of the new Killer 2100 across various computer configurations as I don’t think their use is truly beneficial to the audience Bigfoot seems to target. Higher end systems are barely affected by the relatively few network related process cycles. I think this product would be better suited to mid-ranged laptops boasting bare minimum dedicated GPU power.

Source: Tom’s Hardware