Electron Hut: Kyle Bedell’s Blog

Bigfoot Networks made something of a splash in 2007 with the release of their Killer M1 network card. The premise? That the Windows networking stack was never built for gaming. By offloading network traffic to a dedicated card with its own processor and RAM, you could cut down on a bit of latency, potentially improving your gaming performance. In practice, the M1 didn’t really do all that much to improve ping times. In certain cases, it actually made things worse! Early drivers were buggy, the card was expensive ($300 at launch!), and the M1 was widely regarded as expensive networking snake oil.

Fast forward three years. Bigfoot Networks has recently released their Killer 2100 gaming network card at a much more affordable price point of $129. Has Bigfoot made significant strides in the four years since the M1? Have the drivers improved? Is the card just another piece of networking hooey? Let’s find out!

Hardware and Packaging

I purchased VisionTek’s edition of the Killer 2100 from NewEgg (amazing service as always, thanks guys!). The contents of the box are fairly spartan, containing the card, a driver CD, and a short owner’s manual. The card itself isn’t nearly as flashy as the original Killer M1. I actually prefer the toned-down look; the mesh keeps you from accidentally touching the board when you install the card, and there’s a subtle red LED that lights up the interior when the card is plugged in. The card itself is a single slot PCI Express x1 affair, but it will install in any PCI Express slot size (mine’s in an x4).

Software

The Killer 2100 comes bundled with the Killer Network Manager, a combination benchmarking, tweaking, and monitoring utility that serves as a sort of command center for the card. The app is divided in to five sections: Overview, PC Monitor, Applications, Network, and Advanced.

The Overview section displays basic system information, along with average pings, network processor usage, and whether certain software features like bandwidth control and LAN Exceptions are enabled. The PC Monitor can graph NPU usage and other stats over time. The Applications section lets you prioritize applications and artificially limit their bandwidth (for example, I set my BitTorrent traffic to low priority and restrict it to using 30% of my available bandwidth, leaving plenty of bandwidth available for Katt and my other applications).

The other two sections allow for low-level tweaking. The Network section lets you test (or manually configure) your connection speed, toggle the LAN Exceptions feature (which prevents the card from throttling internal network traffic), and change built-in Windows TCP settings like TCPNoDelay and the TCP ACK frequency. The Advanced section allows for altering the behavior of the Killer 2100′s traffic prioritization rules and some miscellaneous options like turning the built-in LED on or off.

The drivers have been rock-solid. No crashes or bluescreens!

Performance

Snazzy software aside, I’m sure you want the answers to the only questions that really matter: Does it actually work? Does the card reduce latency in games? I’m actually quite pleased to report that the Killer 2100 delivers on its promises. Latency tests are difficult to replicate, since there are myriad variables that can affect that sort of performance. To try and gauge the card’s impact on the two games I play most often, DICE’s Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, I kept a spreadsheet of latencies across five days of playtime. The timeframes were relatively consistent, with most gameplay occurring between 8pm and 11pm, Monday through Friday.

My box has the following specs:

• ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 motherboard
• Intel Core i7 920 (2.6GHz)
• 6GB of Corsair Dominator DDR3 1600 RAM
• Western Digital RE3 1TB hard drive
• ATI Radeon 5870 1GB graphics card

In World of Warcraft, I had an average ping of 180ms running on my Marvell Yukon Gigabit Ethernet controller. In Battlefield: Bad Company 2, I had an average ping of 148ms on the same built-in NIC. Then I installed the Killer 2100, disabled my built-in NICs, and started tracking latencies again. I only have 3 days of sample data (compared to 5 for the Yukon), but the averages have definitely dropped. With the Killer 2100 installed, my average World of Warcraft latency is 98ms. That’s a 46% decrease. In Battlefield: Bad Company 2, my average ping is 101ms, a 32% decrease over the Yukon controller.

My connection in general feels a lot smoother — I used to get small latency spikes and hangups in Bad Company 2 when a helicopter would crash or I was riding shotgun in a vehicle. in World of Warcraft, I’d regularly experience the “teleportation effect” in the major cities where large numbers of players gather. Players would be standing in one spot, running in place, then appear 200 feet away in the blink of an eye. These problems have disappeared on the Killer 2100. The best part is that I didn’t have to manually prioritize my gaming traffic: the card takes care of that for you automatically.

So is the Killer 2100 worth its $129 cost? That depends on two things:

1. Is your connection at least mediocre?
2. Are there other upgrades (like extra RAM or a new video card) that you could put that $129 towards and get better performance?

The Killer 2100 won’t fix a crummy connection, although it can make a mediocre one good and a good one great. It’s definitely geared towards the PC gamer who already has the essentials taken care of (processing power, RAM, and a good video card). If you’re lacking in one of those departments, save your money. However, if you’re searching for a product that will give you an edge that’s next to impossible to gain with other hardware, the Killer 2100 is the upgrade for you. The automatic application prioritization and Windows network stack bypass features really do work, decreasing latency and improving overall network performance. You’ll notice a difference!

You can buy the Killer 2100 from Newegg for $129, but I get a small cut through Amazon Affiliates if you pick it up from Amazon.com.