M1 Killer NIC

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/killer-m1-nic,review-1083.html

Kinda interesting. This is a NIC that offloads the TCP/IP stack to the NIC itself instead of letting the main CPU take the load. It had a 400 MHZ NPU (network processing unit) with 64mb of RAM and had a heat sink.

Some of the benefits are:

Faster ping times and transfer times (although they didn't really test transfer times). The ping times increase about 15-30ms.
Because they were focusing on gaming (for some reason) they saw about a 10% increase in frame rates
It has linux installed on the card (would be fun to hack that)
And you can put a firewall on the card to act has a hardware firewall (really cool)
USB port on the card itself so you can perform transfers directly to the storage medium
And other smaller features

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Comments

HeroPsycho

Call me crazy or closed minded, but I'm not spending $250 on a NIC just on principle alone. I don't care if it can even use the bathroom for me.

Mishra

I definitely wouldn't spend that much for it for home use. Business use there are cases where you might be able to apply this scenario. Plus I'm sure the prices of the card would come down quite a bit.

It was reviewed on tomguide so of course they applied it to games. But I would like to see benchmarks with high network activity servers like a web server.

Mishra

And I guess I'm thinking on the entire TOE structure, not this card particularly.

sprkymrk

HeroPsycho wrote:

Call me crazy or closed minded, but I'm not spending $250 on a NIC just on principle alone. I don't care if it can even use the bathroom for me.

Hard core gamers will pay the price without batting an eye. Some subscribe to online games that cost $15-$25 a month, and several at a time. A $250 card that could give a 10% increase in frame rates is worth it to them, besides the fact that many will justify it as a birthday/Christmas gift.

As far as going to the bathroom, I'm reminded of the Southpark WoW episode...

Mom, MOM!! Bathroom! :P

liven

We use something very similar here.

It is a gig nic, that is put in proc mode to watch network flows on a VERY busy network.

This way the box doing the sniffing can run several nics, watch the traffic in several different ways, and also perform other functions.

Not something I would use at home, but at the office it works very well.

Mishra

A Dell NetXtreme II 5708 TOE NIC for 100 bucks.

http://www.impactcomputers.com/430-1793.html