I picked one of these up in early 2008 to screw around with. I found it cumbersome to use after installing and decided to take it out.

In June, after a significant driver update by Bigfoot Networks, I decided to try it again. After some troubleshooting I got it installed correctly.

It does appear to have a beneficial impact on FPS on online games - I would say 10% or so is fair, based on non-scientific testing. I did not notice a significant ping improvement. I had attempted to use WoW to see if ping was improved at all, and it wasn't; but apparently several months ago WoW changed how they measure the speed of a user's connection.

WoW uses TCP/IP acks to measure client's speed, although the game data itself is UDP. The Killer NIC's strength is in UDP 'acceleration'; for TCP/IP it is no faster than an onboard NIC (both do TCP/IP checksum offloading; most onboard NICs have this capability now.)

The end result was that the WoW client wasn't taking advantage of the faster processing of UDP packets because it was being 'bottlenecked' by the TCP ack speed; WoW simply won't let your client update more frequently than it thinks your system can handle based on the TCP acks.

Bigfoot Networks recently acknowledged this and claimed to be working on a fix, and suggested a work around. But in its current implementation you won't get much benefit from the Killer in WoW, which I would think would be the largest market for this type of device - considering the number of WoW users.

I have not attempted to gauge ping performance using the Killer in other games, although I may test company of heroes next week for kicks (currently the Killer is not in my system.)

Some other criticisms I have for the Killer, all of which I've submitted to Bigfoot Networks:

-From what I can tell they've removed IPv6 and UPnP capabilities from the network card and/or drivers, which means if you want these you have to use a different NIC.

-The integrated firewall, which is nice from a 'save precious computer cycles' standpoint if you disable your software firewall, also prevents Vista's Network Map from functioning properly (a cool but not essential tool.)

-The integrated firewall allows programs to bind listening ports by default; it alerts you when this is happening, but it the default action is to allow, and there is no option to change this behavior.

-There are no presets in the firewall configuration to allow windows file sharing or network discovery, which complicates life if you have a small network at home. I had to manually go into the Advanced Windows Firewall interface to find the various ports I needed to open to allow these basic networking functions. I would also think that there would be certain game presets for the firewall, considering that the Killer NIC is marketed for gamers; there are no presets at all.

-The bandwidth control is actually quite handy, but if you put in the wrong values when configuring it you will actually handicap your LAN transfer speeds to your internet download/upload speeds. This should be more clearly explained within the configuration of the bandwidth control, and it is not. It shouldn't be that easy for a user to shoot themselves in the foot.

-There are two modes for the Killer NIC - game mode and app mode. There are some games that perform better in app mode, but there is no list of what games these are to make it easy for users to decide which mode is the best for their particular game. When I asked for a list of which games work best in which mode, I was told that it wasn't feasible as there are 'thousands' of games. I found this response silly.

-LAN transfer speeds, especially for large files, aren't all that hot; the Killer tries to break these large files into smaller files for 'lower latency' and this results in a drop in transfer speed. They say they are working on improving this dramatically. I personally haven't seen this as a huge issue when I transfer files over my LAN.

In general the Bigfoot Networks guys have acknowledged all of the above shortcomings and say they are working on improvements, with exceptions noted above.

I think, in general, I expected the driver & interface to be more refined than it was, particularly for the price they are asking and the 'enthusiast gamer' market they are targeting.

I like the idea of the Killer NIC - and my FX-60, which can't overclock without absurd levels of additional voltage and worrisome heat levels, needs all the help it can get. The Killer NIC could theoretically provide that - it offloads a decent amount of UDP processing from the default Windows stack onto a separate processor, which is also capable of running a firewall, allowing me to turn off my software-driven Windows Firewall. The hardware itself consists of a FPGA, which makes the card very adaptable using driver updates, and so if improvements continue I think the card will be much more useful. And I do see some improvement in FPS in certain online games, although this is mostly anecdotal and not scientifically measured.

The bandwidth control feature is useful for limiting the overall impact of certain programs on your bandwidth; in particular I found that certain torrent or p2p-like download programs had a significant impact on my Vonage phone, despite my DGL-4500's supposed 'gamefuel' quality of service feature. The Killer's bandwidth control allowed me to cap the amount of bandwidth used by these programs, in particular the download programs used by Adobe or WoW.