Killer NIC

[RancidLunchmeat]

This morning I booted my new system to find that W10 had forgotten my Killer NIC driver and I had no network connectivity.

Could this be related to the W10 update yesterday maybe, or should I be more concerned?

It figures that the one "feature" I didn't want keeps giving me problems (because W10 doesn't have default drivers for the Killer NIC so I need to load them via USB - no optical drive).

I had the drivers still on USB from when I originally built the system, so it wasn't a big deal. But I'm not fond of the idea that on any given day, my computer might not work without reinstalling vital drivers.

 

[DJ12]

Mine is totally f**ked, although it happened before the latest update insider preview was installed. I now have a solid orange light, even though I have disabled it in the bios.

Thank god for mobile tethering, not ideal but will keep me going until amazon deliver me a network card tomorrow.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Mine is totally f**ked, although it happened before the latest update insider preview was installed. I now have a solid orange light, even though I have disabled it in the bios.

Thank god for mobile tethering, not ideal but will keep me going until amazon deliver me a network card tomorrow.

Doesn't your motherboard have an Ethernet port you can use in the meantime? Or wait, is that what the motherboard is using?

Thank goodness I don't care about having a name attached to my Ethernet port. No matter what, mine just works.

Regards,
SB

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

So it's worse than I thought. Not only do the Killer NIC's not actually live up to any of their supposed performance gains, they are actually shoddy and pieces of crap.

Fantastic.

 

[DJ12]

Doesn't your motherboard have an Ethernet port you can use in the meantime? Or wait, is that what the motherboard is using?

Thank goodness I don't care about having a name attached to my Ethernet port. No matter what, mine just works.

Regards,
SB

Yeah it's the motherboard one that's gone. Don't really care for the brand it was just included with my gigabyte gaming 7 motherboard.

Interestingly enough my last mother board blew it's Ethernet port to.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Yeah it's the motherboard one that's gone. Don't really care for the brand it was just included with my gigabyte gaming 7 motherboard.

Interestingly enough my last mother board blew it's Ethernet port to.

Ooof, that's some pretty bad luck. I just recently had Logitech Z-5500 5.1 speaker set die on me. It lasted over 10 years though so I can't be too sad about it. Still was a pain to have to route sound through my monitor until I could get a replacement though.

Regards,
SB

 

[Davros]

Not only do the Killer NIC's not actually live up to any of their supposed performance gains,

The original ones were interesting they apparently had their own o/s (linux) and you could run programs on the card eg: plug a usb drive into the cards usb socket and run a torrent client entirely off the network card
totally independent of the host pc (i dont know if you could turn the pc off)

 

[DJ12]

more damning evidence against, new network card (Realtek based) holds a stable 220mbit download speed, the killer on board never got higher than 215 and would fluctuate wildly from the same source.

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

more damning evidence against, new network card (Realtek based) holds a stable 220mbit download speed, the killer on board never got higher than 215 and would fluctuate wildly from the same source.

Which card did you get? I've noticed my download speed is half of what I get on my other systems (30Mbt rather than 60Mbt), but thought it was due to my powerline adaptors and being upstairs and too far away. But now I think I'm going to check the speeds on my old i5 with an intel NIC to see if there's a difference. They're both connected to the same Rosewill 1Gig switch, so it should be an even comparison (they sit at the same desk, old/new system).

Also,did you have any concerns about adding another PCIe card and taking up additional lanes? I'm still confused as to how many lanes, the i5 only allows 20 right? So if my 1070 is taking up x16 and my M.2 is taking up x4, even though I have available PCIe interfaces, using them will degrade the performance of the others, correct?

Ugh.

 

[swaaye]

Can't you just run some regular Atheros driver instead of the Killer software? I know I read that somewhere in recent times....

Probably useless if the chip is toast though.

 

[DJ12]

Which card did you get? I've noticed my download speed is half of what I get on my other systems (30Mbt rather than 60Mbt), but thought it was due to my powerline adaptors and being upstairs and too far away. But now I think I'm going to check the speeds on my old i5 with an intel NIC to see if there's a difference. They're both connected to the same Rosewill 1Gig switch, so it should be an even comparison (they sit at the same desk, old/new system).

Also,did you have any concerns about adding another PCIe card and taking up additional lanes? I'm still confused as to how many lanes, the i5 only allows 20 right? So if my 1070 is taking up x16 and my M.2 is taking up x4, even though I have available PCIe interfaces, using them will degrade the performance of the others, correct?

Ugh.

Didn't really think about it to be honest, have an i7 4790k and just a single gpu using pcie, plus I think the mobo has additional PCIe lanes anyway

I just for a cheap card made by csl from Amazon

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

As far as my Killer NIC throughput goes, I compared it to the Intel NIC on my 1st Gen i5 and it was the same. So it seems like it is just the powerline adapters that are leeching 20Mbs (1/3rd - not half as I incorrectly stated above) of my bandwidth going from downstairs by the router to upstairs. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, I'm running some old Netgear that are supposed to be 200Mpbs, so I guess the fact that they are really only running at 30Mpbs shouldn't be surprising.