Bigfoot Networks Killer 2100 Gaming Network Card Review

So the box says UP TO 10X Faster.  I don’t like hype, but I do like performance.   That said, I’m not sure what or where they get that figure (10x faster) from.  Are they comparing 100mbit cards with their new 1000mbit PCIe card?  If that’s the case it isn’t really a fair statement.  That’s like me saying I can walk up to 100x faster than a baby (who crawls).  Bigfoot Networks DOES HOWEVER have the goods.  I’m not talking about benchmark “goods” that perform well in a lab either.  I’m talking about real life every day use “goods”.  The card fits in any PCIe slot so there isn’t any issue there, the drivers are readily available on the net or you can use the disc that comes with the card.  I used to login with a 90ms ping playing Bad Company 2 Vietnam on my favorite server (The Ze: Charlie Can’t Surf) and I used to get about 2.9 megabytes per second sustained downloading large files from the Internet from my Comcast connection.

After installing the Bigfoot Networks Killer 2100 Gaming Network card, setting the settings to TCP NO DELAY and TCP ACK Frequency to 1, I average about 60ms on the same Bad Company 2 server, and believe it or not I break well over 3 Megabytes per second (It goes 3.7 megabytes per second and slowly winds down to about 3.1 megabytes per second sustained).  This is a significant improvement, and well if you are into performance you will think that is worth about $200 which is how much the card costs.

I definitely think it has improved my game play (faster Ping = less lag).  See what happens is this… you could be running up the street to say shoot someone and they could be coming at you at the same time.  They might pull the trigger at the same exact time you do, but you will kill them… because your response was sent to the server 30ms faster than theirs was so the server acknowledged your key press first, and your opponent gets owned, even though his timing was just as good as yours.  It sounds unfair, but honestly most of the people that are on gaming servers that are “Amazing” are not really “Amazing” their connection to the Internet is.  You will see more often than not… their ping times are much lower than everyone elses.  That translates to up to 1/2 a second on someone else… and that’s a long time to pull a trigger (you can press a key 2 – 3 times in a half a second).

So how does it work?  It has a 400mhz processor and 256 megs of DDR2 RAM on it, and that processor handles all the network management so the CPU on your computer can actually handle the stuff that matters on the game side.  It’s called a TCP Offload and it works well.

So check it out, it’s worth it if you are competitive and you game.  I’ll give 4 out of 5 stars.  We put it on the list of Father’s Day Gift Suggestions as well.