“Up to 10X faster than standard connections, the Killer 2100 delivers unprecedented performance while reducing stuttering, freezing and other symptoms of lag in online games. The result? Higher scores, more kills.”
Woah woah woah. Shut the front door. Let’s just take a look at this. 10 times faster than what, exactly? Latency is introduced in so many places other than the NIC that I would say the NIC is the most efficient part of the system. Packet loss occurs at any of like a billion places your bits are exchanged, redirected, backed up, and so on. Buying one of these NICs would be like buying a moving driveway for your car and saying it improved mileage.
Observe this handy chart I made for the occasion.
To be honest, I’m sure it’s a perfectly good network card. But I really don’t think that any of the effects of lag, packet loss, choke, or all the other things that can go wrong with a sustained connection, are occurring in whatever it replaces. My onboard Ethernet can easily sustain two or three megabytes per second, and games use a tiny fraction of that. Furthermore, these days, most gameplay is calculated client-side, which is the reason you don’t have to lead your shots any more. Lag is resolved and predicted for at the server level. You’re a hundred times, a hundred thousand times, more likely to get gameplay problems from a fragmented hard drive, outdated graphics drivers, an old sound card — hell, moving the shadows notch up or down one setting will affect your performance way more than getting a $129 special network interface card.
Look, when it comes to trading bits with your router or cable modem, even the cheapest PCs out there are hot rods. Don’t even think about getting one of these things — but if you feel the need to investigate further, head over to <a href="Bigfoot Networks. And when you come back, some guy was talking about a bridge he had for sale.