Network Cards

Boxrocket · July 9, 2014

Team,

Since I live in the States, I have used Killer NIC products to connect to European servers to give me a slight edge with my latency. There are no more players in the game here in the US if you are wondering why I must play Euro servers.

My problem is that the NIC card is old and even though it does its job, it comes at the expense of sometimes crashing the computer on startup or buggy network problems when using other programs. It used to never do this, but as the years pass and programs update, they left this NIC card in the dust.

Can anyone out there suggest a network card that is good for gaming and up to date? Please, I don't want to hear about the ethernet connection to my motherboard. I have the X79 EVGA Classified board and it is a slightly slower connection without the network card.

Moderate suggestions to ridiculous overkill suggestions is what I am looking for. Maybe if you have experience with some cheap NIC too, that can compete with Killer NIC, that may work too.

Thanks for the help,

Boxrocket

MouseTrsp · July 9, 2014

One of the cards I have used and am using now that I have been happy with is the StarTech PCIe x4 ST2000SPEXI it is a dual port NIC and supports teaming along with many other features. Not sure what your looking for over your on-board NIC in terms of features or what not, but Intel NIC controllers are normally some of the best. What are you looking for / needing from it?

I know you say that your onboard NICs are slow but your running two Intel NICs one is the i217 the other is an i210, the card I listed above runs the High performance i350. Possible teaming the two i350 ports would give you the increased bandwidth your looking for. Other than that try and reconfigure your network settings to fit your needs. Not sure if this is what your asking but I hope it helps...

Boxrocket · July 9, 2014

Wow thanks for the input. I know just a little about networking, but as per your response it looks like I need to keep studying. I am in school for mechanical engineering and just have not allocated any time to studying networking issues.

I sure do appreciate your response. Since I don't possess much knowledge of what exactly I need, I sound like a noob. All I can say at the moment with no studying is,"I need something that claims it is going to give me better throughput than my onboard NIC". Sorry for being a noob.

Thanks,

MouseTrsp · July 9, 2014

Wow thanks for the input. I know just a little about networking, but as per your response it looks like I need to keep studying. I am in school for mechanical engineering and just have not allocated any time to studying networking issues.

I sure do appreciate your response. Since I don't possess much knowledge of what exactly I need, I sound like a noob. All I can say at the moment with no studying is,"I need something that claims it is going to give me better throughput than my onboard NIC". Sorry for being a noob.

Thanks,

You should see a jump in performance and a latency drop running a single i350. Teaming might raise your latency but will raises your usable throughput, that said all of this is limited to your connection / network setup. Teaming them would offer you a 2 gigabit connection over your network opposed to a single ports 1 gigabit but not much help over your ISP connection. All this is dependent of your network and use case of course.