There's a war going on in the land of networking. Over the last year we've seen Rivet Network's Killer e2400 Gigabit Ethernet controller springing up all over the place, mostly on gaming-oriented motherboards, although we've also seen it in Dell and Alienware PCs. It promises to deliver razor-sharp pings while simultaneously allowing large downloads and media streaming in the background, but we've been a little skeptical so far. This is because our earlier experiences with Killer networking products weren't the greatest, but the time has come to put the company's latest Ethernet controller to the Labs test.
But before we head to the benchmarks, let's take a look at Rivet's past.
BIGFOOT COMES WITH A BIG PRICE
The first Killer NIC landed in Australia 2007, but the company behind it was known as Bigfoot. The early product was extremely expensive, retailing for around $350 in Australia, and it was basically a system-on-a-chip running at 400MHz with integrated DDR memory, all mounted on a PCI card. It promised to deliver lower pings in games, no matter what you were doing with your system, but the reality didn't quite live up to the hype.
As CPU speeds began to increase, Bigfoot released more affordable products, but by late 2008 their hardware was no match for the processing power of a CPU in charge of an onboard NIC, and the popularity of their Gigabit products waned further.
However, the company seemed to have more success with Wi-Fi products, and its Killer range of Wi-Fi cards were acclaimed for excellent performance and range. These used Atheros hardware, a company which was purchased by industry heavyweight Qualcomm in early 2011. By late 2011 Bigfoot itself had been acquired by Qualcomm.
Fast forward to today and Bigfoot has spun off from Qualcomm once more, in the form of Rivet Networks. However, the company's products are still based on Qualcomm hardware - the company's focus now is on the software stack that controls the NIC. As with earlier Killer products, the goal is to prioritise gaming traffic first, then everything else after that, and it does so using a technology called Advanced Stream Detect 2.0.
This works by detecting each type of traffic, then classifying it, and finally prioritising. When the software is left in default mode, it gives priority to games, then real time video and voice, then web browser traffic, then anything left, such as Windows updates or Torrent downloads.
This might sound similar to the Quality of Service feature found on most routers, but according to Rivet CEO Mike Cubbage, the Killer software technique is much smarter. For starters, using a router with QoS can't stop your ping spiking as you download or stream media - it's not controlling the NIC, so isn't able to prioritise your traffic at the PC end. Secondly, most QoS services use whitelists to allocate bandwidth - if an application isn't in the whitelist, the router won't know what to do. This issue is also what separates other third party Ethernet solutions such as Asus’ GameFirst III technology, which apparently all use a whitelist. Killer's software doesn't use a table-based solution like this, instead applying heuristic analysis similar to a virus scanner to identify various types of network packets. Therefore it should be able to manage traffic even when a brand new application is sending data, whereas whitelist based solutions need to continually update their table every time new software is released. Interestingly, in the past we found this to be an issue with Killer software - it wouldn't work unless we manually edited a text file and added the name of the new application. Thankfully the new software removes this issue.
THE GAMING TEST
To test Killer's latest e2400 solution, we used Asrock's Fatality B150 Gaming K4 motherboard with an Intel i7-6700K CPU, 8GB of DDR4-2400MHz and twin Corsair SSDs. It was connected via Ethernet to an Optus NBN Fibre to the Home connection that has a confirmed speed of 100Mbit/s down and 30Mbit/s up. Our second machine was similarly specced but used Intel's new I219V controller instead of the Killer e2400. Before the test began, we fired up Killer's control panel and ensured our connection speed was set correctly - apparently this is crucial for the software to work properly.
To ensure the Fibre connection was under the most load possible, we first downloaded several Linux distros from the Optus file mirrors using Filezilla, which reached a download speed of around ЗМВ/sec. At the same time three torrents were downloaded via uTorrent, reaching a combined download speed of 2.5MB/sec. And just to really push it, we also started a Steam download at the same time, which hit 5MB/sec. We realise that most gamers probably don't have this kind of connection, which is why we had to ensure it was under the maximum load possible.
To test the ping in-game we fired up the first person shooter called Insurgency - we decided to go for something less popular than Team Fortress 2 or CS: GO to check if the Killer software would detect it accurately. Both machines connected to the same local server, which consistently registers a 15ms ping when no other apps are in use. As the screenshots show, the Killer solution allowed us to play with an extremely low ping of just 17ms. Meanwhile the Intel solution rocketed up to 171ms, making the game basically unplayable. We're confident that this ping problem would be exacerbated on a slower connection. We also measured CPU load of the Killer software during the testing, and it never exceeded a couple of percent, which is well within the range expected.
So far so good, and after running these tests we could then use the Killer software to see exactly which apps were using bandwidth via the System Performance page. This can also drill down into separate Upload and Download pages, which would prove very useful for those with data caps.
The final page that we looked at showed the Applications, and how they were ranked by priority. The Killer software has six levels of prioritisation, and interestingly it automatically placed most apps into Priority level 4. However, our game was given top priority. This screen allows users to manually adjust the priority of certain applications.
KILLING IT
Our final test was game performance with all other apps disabled, and it's here that Killer's claims of "beating the competition by up to 50% during single application usage" didn't quite stand up. Both the Intel NIC and Killer NIC recorded an average ping to the same server of 15ms - in other words, they were identical.
As our real world tests show, Killer's latest product does offer real benefits when it comes to running multiple applications over a single Internet connection - it definitely prioritises game performance first. Yet we wouldn't expect a NIC to speed up download speeds or lower pings when nothing else is happening. So if you're determined to run other bandwidth intensive applications while you game, Killer will ensure you get the best possible experience.
Your other option is to simply disable any downloads, web browsers or other apps while gaming, though this is becoming increasingly difficult as more pieces of software (cough Windows 10 cough) have started to automatically download updates in the background without the user's permission. In these cases, Killer's worth is easy to prove, and we're happy to now view the company's products as a positive rather than a negative.
DRIVER DRAMAS
Rivet suggested we download the latest Killer suite of software from their website (version 1.1.56.1603), but we were unable to for the first couple of attempts. The first time we tried downloading it, our speed was limited to just 35KB/sec, and after a couple of hours of downloading it failed. We then restarted the download twice more, finally succeeding in finishing the download. Quite a remarkably poor result from a networking company.
In the meantime we tried a slightly older version of the software direct from ASRock, the maker of the motherboard we used to test the e2400 NIC. This software was version 1.1.52.1451. Unfortunately, we encountered numerous issues when using this version - for example, with Bandwidth control enabled via the Killer software, our Chrome browser stopped working if we were also downloading via uTorrent. Disabling bandwidth control resolved this. Thankfully when we finally installed the most recent version of the software, the problems disappeared. So take it from us - if you’re running a Killer network solution, head direct to http://www.killernetworking.com/support/driver-downloads to get the latest drivers.
NOT JUST NICS
We should point out that no matter how good your NIC is, it’s just one link in a long chain of devices when playing online or downloading. A flaky router or switch can wreak havoc, while there’s no way to control the various servers your game packets must be sent through when playing online. When we initially started testing, we couldn’t figure out why our pings were all over the place, but after several hours of troubleshooting finally located the problem. Our testing area was connected to our Fibre-to-the-Home connection via an Ethernet over Power kit, and it seems that the power lines in the house weren’t exactly rock-solid. We eventually swapped this for a 20 metre Ethernet cable and our results stabilised.
KILLER DOUBLESHOT PRO
One feature that we weren’t able to test can be found on motherboards that feature two Killer network solutions, including Wi-Fi. Called DoubleShot Pro, it can detect which is the fastest link, and put the highest priority traffic through that link. It’s even possible to connect each to a different broadband network, though each connection must handle different tasks - it appears they can’t be combined to handle one download.