Killer NIC K1 and Custom BitTorrent Client Tested

NetworkingNed writes "The new Killer NIC K1 is the successor to the much debated original Killer NIC card that offers the same features at a lower price: this time for about $170 or so. Not cheap, that's for sure. But in this review at PC Perspective, not only is the new card tested under the drastically updated Vista networking stack with improved results, but the free BitTorrent client that runs on the Killer NIC is reviewed as well; with it you should be able to download torrents without affecting online gaming performance. Enough to warrant a $175 network card?"

Re:Obvious

[solafide]

Yes it does. Scroll down in the PC Perspective article [pcper.com] to the FNA=Flexible Network Architecture section - it's about a page down. It talks about how the card is basically a miniature computer, running Linux.

No, but yes...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not going to save any electricity. You rather have 2 boxes on while you're gaming instead of one, and while you're not gaming you still have one sucking electricity. There's no real energy savings here.

But energy saving aside, it's still a good setup. Spend that 175$ on a 500GB HD, and throw it in an old lifecycled 2GHz box (with enough RAM preferably). Run all the P2P apps you want on it. Use it as NAT/firewall (DNS if you want, and filtering proxy, etc). And LAMP server. Throw MySQL/PostgreSQL/Firebird or whatever DBs you need on it. And SVN/CVS/whatever-you-like repository, and continuous integration server. Host your personal wiki stuff on it. Use it as a file server. Make it a video/music server. Setup a VPN to access your stuff when away from home (and even Terminal Server if you want). Use it to do backups and burn discs. Set it up as a MythTV (or VDR) and/or Asterisk server. Install VMWare Server on it to do all your software testing (installations, deployment, running stuff on other platforms/distros, etc). Use it to re-encode DVDs or recorded shows to mpeg4 (XviD or x264). Install a DynDNS client (or whatever similar service, to keep it updated). Use it to automate X10/home automation stuff. And if the load is light enough and it's in a convenient location, it can be a perfectly fine family PC (check email/browse web/play mp3s/watch movies in mpeg4 or off youtube/google for recipes/check weather forecast/use it to sync your mp3 player's contents/whatever you want). Too many possible uses to list...

I wouldn't have a 2nd box just as a NAT/router or just for BitTorrent, but there's so many other uses for it - even for the average home user. A lot of families have more than one computer nowadays (and having one totally defeats the point of a ridiculously expensive NIC). I'd rather just stop BT while I play games and restart it after I'm done rather than buying this thing anyways.

Re:No, but yes...

[tomhudson]

"It's not going to save any electricity. You rather have 2 boxes on while you're gaming instead of one, and while you're not gaming you still have one sucking electricity. There's no real energy savings here.

You might game for an hour or two, and download/seed for 24 - for 22 of those hours, your main box is off and not using electricity - and its more than likely that you can run the older box headless, saving even more juice; also that the video card in the older box doesn't run as hot ...

Re:Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, right here [kernel.org]

Re:Enough to warrant a $175 network card?

[hjf]

gold-plated connectors for digital interfaces is absurd.

ever looked at ANY PCI card? notice how the contacts are golden? notice that they don't rust? guess what. gold plated. it's just that gold plating is so overrated. a few grams of gold are enough to plate hundreds of PCI cards, so it doesn't add that much to the price of the card or connector actually. so yes, even digital interfaces benefit from gold plating (probably more than analog connections do).

Re:No, but yes...

[arivanov]

Seconded - the thermal footprint of an average P3 after replacing the disks with modern ones is in the sub-50W range. The CPU depending on the model consumes 18-27W at max utilisation, disks are at most 10W each and peripherals rack up 10W or so on top of that. This is comparable to the thermal footprint of a 1GHz+ mini-ITX which is about as low as you can get with modern x86 hardware.

Compared to that a modern gaming capable system runs happily into the 400W+ territory. Even with all the advances in power saving modes on the peripherals and the CPU you are likely to find running an old P3 for router/firewall/P2P/file server/etc considerably more efficient compared to allocating these resources on your "main" box.

The only problem is the scarcity of CPU fans for P3s. There are none on the market. Athlon heatsinks/coolers for the older socket format often need cutting bits off and are also getting rare, so finding a suitable set to refurbish an old box may prove extremely challenging.

Re:other products?

[Andy Dodd]

No clue why you got modded -1, it's a good question. Most consumer-grade routers suck.

Look into DD-WRT or a similar "aftermarket firmware" on a compatible router. I suggest the Buffalo WHR-G54S - Cheap ($50 at Circuit City, $43 or so shipped from NewEgg) and fully compatible with DD-WRT.

The problem is not the CPU speed, but the fact that many routers have too small of an ip_conntrack table (or the equivalent if they do not run Linux). DD-WRT lets you bump up the size of that table and decrease the idle connection timeout time. Boom, most common router problem fixed. (No clue why no manufacturer does this... It's not like an extra 512 entries in the table really takes up that much more memory.)

It also lets you prioritize traffice, dumping BitTorrent (or whatever you choose) traffic to the lowest priority. I can run all the BitTorrent I want and never affect any games. :)