killer xeno ultra nic

jamesleecoleman

I came across this nic Killer? Xeno? Ultra
but I'm not sure if it's worth the money. I'm wondering what you all might think about it. I have dual network interfaces on my board and when ever I have a heavy website, my cpu works harder and it sucks because I'll be doing something else and I'll start to get slow performance all around. My computer won't let me combine the network interfaces for the traffic. I read a review on an older card and the review basically told me that there was better performance but I'm not sure if theres anything else that I could do to improve my performance.

paintb4707

If its feasible I think you would see much better performance by upgrading your CPU. I don't really see how a "killer xeno" NIC would help you all that much.

dynamik

Maybe if you did pro-level gaming on LANs.

120nm4n

I think your money would be better spent upgrading other parts of your PC.

jamesleecoleman

dynamik wrote: »

Maybe if you did pro-level gaming on LANs.

Or would it be helpful if I use my computer as a dedicated server while at a LAN get together?

tiersten

jamesleecoleman wrote: »

I have dual network interfaces on my board and when ever I have a heavy website, my cpu works harder and it sucks because I'll be doing something else and I'll start to get slow performance all around.

It isn't because of your network interfaces. The slow performance is from the browser and the rest of the OS. The minor performance increase from offloading the TCP/IP stack to the killer NIC card isn't going to make a significant difference to your system.

Waste of money. Buying a faster CPU would do more to speed up your system.

tiersten

jamesleecoleman wrote: »

Or would it be helpful if I use my computer as a dedicated server while at a LAN get together?

No. You're just offloading the work of handling the TCP/IP stack.

msteinhilber

I have an Asus board with dual Marvell gigabit interfaces onboard in my primary workstation and another workstation with Realtek gigabit interfaces onboard. Under both Vista x64 and Windows 7 RC1 x64 I had pretty terrible network throughput on both machines. I had the same slow transfer speeds on the cheapo Linksys gigabit switch I was using in my home network as well as on a spare HP ProCurve gigabit switch.

I made a purchase of a couple Intel PRO/1000 PT desktop adapters (somewhat cheap higher end pci-e card) and the difference in throughput was amazing. I'd be lucky to top out at 12MB/s with the onboard interfaces on either rig running either Win7 or Vista. Switched to the PRO/1000 PT PCI-E cards and I can easily sustain between 65-75MB/s to a RAID-10 share also on a PRO/1000 PT adapter.

If you do a lot of file transfers over your LAN, I can see the benefit for a better NIC. I wouldn't get one expecting your browsing experience or overall computing experience to benefit though.

Ahriakin

I'm using onboard NICs (A mix of Marvel and Realtek) for my 3 main PCs with a cheap trendnet Gigabit switch and I can get 200-500Mbps depending on the file types.
Back to the original question I'd agree on a CPU upgrade being a better bet. Online latency is so far behind LAN performance that unless something is seriously wrong with your NIC it's not going to be a realworld bottleneck.

darkerosxx

The Killer NICs are really for pro gaming. When you have a topped out system, how do you gain more performance? With a Killer NIC, some processing is done on the NIC, itself, rather than on the CPU. It just another way to eek out more performance from a gaming rig.