MSI to Use Killer Network Adapters in Laptops, Motherboards

By Niels Broekhuijsen
published

MSI to use Killer network adaptors in a select number of motherboards and gaming laptops.

MSI has joined companies such as Gigabyte and Alienware (Dell) in featuring Qualcomm Atheros' Killer network adapters on certain motherboards and gaming laptops to improve gaming experience and video streaming performance. The chip in question is the Killer E2200 which features a number of improvements over its predecessor, the E2100. For example, the E2200 has driver support for Windows 8 and Linux and MSI has worked with Qualcomm Atheros to create a software package that allows users to choose which data packets get priority.

We can expect the first Killer-powered MSI devices to be announced during CEBIT from March 5 to 9 in Germany.

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Niels Broekhuijsen
Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

18 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Firedrops
    What a name, I thought it meant that the network adapters were of supermystical performance!
    Reply
  • falchard
    It means the Network Adapter is sophisticated enough to easily allow the user to determine network traffic priority. Still I like what MSI does.
    Reply
  • mouse24
    falchardIt means the Network Adapter is sophisticated enough to easily allow the user to determine network traffic priority. Still I like what MSI does.
    No no I am quite certain that it injects network packets directly into the human brain to kill them.
    (in other news have you seen there commercials? They are hilarious. I require this to be linked in the article, its too good.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhm8QcAMdSc
    Reply
  • ubercake
    Do these things really make a difference?
    Reply
  • mayankleoboy1
    basically pointless chip. With a software, all the functionality of this chip can be done on the CPU itself, using barely 1-2% load. I wouldnt want this chip to suck uo=p battery.

    Still as a marketing gimmick, this is great.
    Reply
  • Onus
    I seem to recall an article some time back in which they were shown to make a statistically significant, but very small difference. My take was that if it adds more than a couple dollars to the price, it isn't worth it. I suspect an application like cFosSpeed can do at least as much; a version of this utility is bundled with many Asus and ASRock boards.
    I'd prefer MSI to work on quality. They need to improve their VRMs and/or cool them better, especially on lower-end boards.
    Reply
  • bucknutty
    I few years back I bought a Killer M1 PCI for around $20 bucks. At the time they were still going for around $200 new. The card worked great and I used it for about a year and tested it in every way I could imagine to see if it increased FPS in games, or if it decreased CPU load. It is no faster than the basic $10 generic nic with a broadcom chip.
    It was infact a good bit slower when doing transfers of large amounts of files. For example when I backed up my computer, I only backed up my important files and docs, so maybe 10-20 gigs but it was 1000s of files. That took for ever, twice as long as the onboard nic or the cheap pci nic.
    Reply
  • TheBigTroll
    id prefer a intel nic over this. better drivers
    Reply
  • cats_Paw
    MSI is always trying to improve... seems good to me.
    Reply
  • mcoutu
    I have a MSI GE60 / W8 with the E2200 in it. Have this laptop for a month and a half now. Works fine so far. is it faster than another NIC ? Can't say, I don't do benchmark for NICs.
    Reply