Bigfoot's Killer E2100

[rhodders]

Hi all,
My G1.Guerrilla advertises itself as having this nifty little DDR2 'NPU' that utilises it's 1 GB of memory to manage network traffic. Question is: does it only work for an ethernet connected to the RJ-45 port or will it work with a PCI or USB adapter (considering the MoBo is probably cleverer than me)?

Also, should it work with the latter, which is best to use the PCI or USB adaptor?

Many thanks.

 

[stingstang]

It'll work with anything you can connect your network to the card with. That said, you're not going to see a difference in online performance unless you're sunning a dual core processor, and also playing games while doing something on the web on another screen at the same time.

 

[mightymaxio]

Although i wonder if the KillerNIC's are good for fileservers or a NAS. Since these would be cheaper than the $300 NICS for servers.

 

[rhodders]

I have a Gulftown i7 980, so that's...6(?) cores.
The E2100 doesn't come in card form with this MoBo, it's a physical onboard chip on the board itself.

Example (source unknown):
<img src="http://i85.photobucket.com/albums/k68/Rhodders83/killer-e2100_x256.jpg">

 

[bucknutty]

The network connector on the back of the board is hard wired to the killer nic NPU. This network processing unit is its own self contaned PC that runs a custom linux operating system. Windows communicates to it through a driver just like any other piece of hard ware.

The thougt behind the npu is to by pass the regular windows network stack so that the computer does not need to use any of its resources to maintain the network connection. This should in theroy make the whole computer faster. The NPU also has the ability to do all kinds of neat tasks like run its own torrent program or its own voice chat program with out using the main CPU. Again this frees up the main CPU to do more important jobs and should make over all computer run faster.

In reality the networking aspect of a PC is so tiny that it really does not slow the computer at all. The windows netowrk stack takes like 0.5% of total resources so freeing that up does not really help anything.

Unfortanitly BigFoot technology the company that makes the killer nic never really finished any of the cool productivity apps they were going to develop so that cool hightech NPU is really about as useful as a $10 gigabit network card.

I actually removed mine becuase it was just in the way. I mean it worked fine, but so did the onboard network card.