Bigfoot Networks Killer NIC horrible bussiness practices

[BrockSampson]

I am not sure if you guys have been to newegg.com and looked at the Killer NIC lately but the reviews are absolutely ridiculous.


Look here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16833342001

Apparently newegg.com has allowed "Manufacturer Responses". I actually think that this is a great idea, and I love that they are tagged appropriately.

What I don't like is the attempt by Bigfoot Networks to throw their own reviews in there. Its not obvious... well to me it is.... but you can really tell that either they are paying people to put in reviews or they are putting them in. Now I have no proof of this but when 90% of reviewers have serious problems with a product and somehow 5-6 people have completely avoided these problems and had huge frame rate increases in their games and just LOVE the card.... you begin to question the validity of those reviews.

Another thing I have noticed is people complaining that Bigfoot is removing posts on their own forums when people bash their product.

I think Bigfoot Networks needs to own up that they screwed up big time. It looks like there are serious issues in either the software or hardware and after all this time those problems continue.

According to their reply posts on newegg.com they claimed to have fixed the issues with new drivers. I am personally not convinced enough to purchase a NIC from them.

With that all said, I do love the idea behind the NPU. But, the technology could be used for good or evil really. The ability to write programs on the card can allow you to have enhanced protection on your network... it also gives you the hardware you need to circumvent the programs designed to catch you cheating in popular online games....

If anyone has ANY experience with the Bigfoot NIC please post your personal review. I am really interested to see how many REAL people have found the card to be a useful piece of hardware.

 

[choknuti]

Welcome to the world of marketing
Actually the piece of hardware is pretty interesting (not as a nic but its ability to run linux)

 

[thepustule]

Products like this always make me wonder. I mean, exactly how powerful is the embedded chip on the card? Is it actually faster than the host computer's CPU?

This is similar to the experience I've had with hardware RAID cards. In the past, many times I installed hardware RAID in servers. But often with a good SMP system software RAID was actually faster than the hardware RAID, because the software RAID ran on the host's CPU which is 3GHz while the processor on the raid card was only 1GHz. Sure, the 1GHz RAID processor could outperform a 2GHz CPU, or even a 3GHz single-CPU, but on SMP it just couldn't keep up because the host PC was SO fast.

For another example of this phenomenon (general purpose PCs outperforming special purpose coprocessors) take a look at the following article on why linux kernel developers are shying away from supporting TOE engines. ( article )

I wonder how good this card actually is? Yes, the Linux bit is fascinating, but how good is it as a game accelerator?