IT Professionals

WoW – That Is An Expensive NIC

Posted by on Nov 15, 2008 | 9 Comments

As I type this, my brother is likely at home playing with his latest install of the new World of Warcraft “Wrath of the Lich King” on his computer. While I have never really been able to get back into gaming myself, others have found that World of Warcraft or “WoW” is the next best thing to getting in touch with your inner adventurer.

Despite that appeal, some users seem to go so far overboard with the investment they make in this hardware that it goes from reasonable to insane. For example, take this NIC. Clearly, a quality device that undoubtedly provides every ounce of value promised. However the fact remains — do you really need this much networking card to enjoy your favorite PC game? Apparently in the case of the “Killer Gaming Network Card,” the results for gamers speak for themselves.

So here is where it gets a little strange — these cards range from US $150 to $250. No, that is not a typo, this is more than most of you will ever spend on wired networking for your PC and not end up with a new router. Any doubt aside, I would agree that a strong network card along with other quality components will make or break most popular video game experiences, but spending that much on a NIC is just insane! Am I wrong? Can you justify the $250 large for gaming with a new NIC? Hit the comments; set me straight.

  • http://www.goretsky.com/ Aryeh Goretsky

    Hello,

    I have spent that much (and more) on NICs for servers, so I do not think that is an outrageous prices to spend for a NIC, however, I would question the performance improvement one has by dropping such a card into a gaming PC. Every review I have read of Killer Networking’s hardware seems ambivalent about the performance gains—some small improvements may have been noted, but the speed of the Internet connection seems to play a more important role.

    All the recent motherboards I have purchased use on-board NICs from Intel in them with various options for offloading checksumming, moderating interrupt usage, large send offloading, enabling receive side scaling and modifying the transmission buffer size to improve the speed of the network connection and reduce host CPU utilization. I would imagine one could spend a small amount of time researching their effects and perhaps end up with an incremental improvement in gaming speed.

    It seems to me, though, that most of the benefits of advanced network interface cards and settings tweaking vanish at the residential gateway or the Internet access device to which the NIC is attached. Investing a faster Internet connection would probably be a better investment for the gamer.

    Regards,

    Aryeh Goretsky

  • Carl Cronk

    Just goes to prove:
    “A [Gamer / Golfer / Skier / Techie / Fan / devotee] and their money are soon parted!

    Golfers routinely spend hundreds on a new driver or putter with “magic” power – - – when the only “magic” is in the eye / mind / and muscle of the guy holding a stick.

    All people – whether they realize it or not – spend their time and their money on what they consider to be important.

    Live Long, and Prosper,
    Carl

  • Bob W

    Actually, getting the K1 on sale @ for about $125.00 was a good deal. I have seen it increase performance in games drastically, especially on mid to low end game systems (with @ least 1GB of RAM)

    The K1 Nic really did make PvP playable and non-frustrating to me. It also made heavy zones like “Ironlag” (ok… Ironforge) usable even during heavy server load.

    There are some cool ways that type of NIC can help your gaming.
    - It has an IPchains firewall built in, allowing you to plug directly to the internet, bypassing (really in parallel with) your hardware firewall.
    - You don’t have to use a software firewall with it (another drag-down)
    - It does an exceptional job of replacing (not adding in to) the Windows IP stack and provides some performance gains that way.

    Well, those are just some of “my opinions” take em or leave em, it has done my system a lot of good.

  • http://blog.discoveringstyle.com BlueCockatoo

    I have recently got into writing plugins for my WordPress blog and am pretty impressed and pleased with the functionality available through their API. I can also see how it could be abused. It is a shame that we have to worry about it like that, especially because many people just don’t have the skills or patience to learn the skills they need to build their own plugins so have to rely on what’s offered that others have written.

    Honestly, you are lucky, Chris, that you and your staff can do what needs to be done with your WP installations, because most people just can’t… It’s easy to say “don’t use any plugins you didn’t write/inspect yourself”, but just not practical for the majority of bloggers who are non-technical. Not sure what a viable alternative is, though. :(

  • http://twitter.com/jeffnorris J Norris

    Don’t blame the plugins, or the platform. Blame the admin that trusts a plugin, a add-in , a script kitty and implements it on their blog. WordPress has a great community, and when a vulnerabilities is found they are quick the take action, this of course is when its in the ‘core’ code and not 3rd party add-ins.

    That being said the number of plug-in that phish, or are dangerous to run are few and far between. I have heard Chris say that his site is so shimmed together that it is kludge. This is do to have many developers piece things together, not document it, or make mistakes. Again not to blame the platform, but the developer and ultimately the user of the platform itself. If don’t like it, change it after all it is opensource.

  • Derek Harding

    “you can’t be hacked via a bot that just tries known exploits over and over if your site runs a non-standard version of the software”

    Sorry but this is simply not true. Unless your changes break specific functionality required by the exploit (not something that’s guaranteed) you will still be vulnerable.

    Ultimately this problem exists for any open, extensible system. The solutions are either
    a. Severely restrict the extensibility so nothing dangerous can be done or
    b. Validate every extension before it’s allowed to be used ala itunes store.

  • Anonymous

    So what do the small biz owners who are NOT nerds and/or have no time do? Where are the folks we can hire who can do a test on our sites and tell us what plug ins are “bad”

  • http://sunnyis.me/ Sunny Singh

    It really is the responsibility of the site owner/manager. Sure there are many faulty and insecure plugins out there, but you shouldn’t freely install every plugin that you find “cool” and expect everything to be okay. Take a look at the ratings, reviews, and ask yourself whether installing it is really needed. Most of the functionality of plugins I find people installing can be usually achieved with raw code, and it’s understandable that not everyone is a developer but it’s better to know what you’re doing before finding out that you’ve been hacked.

    It’s also usually never WordPress’s fault, the staff take security very seriously and work fast to fix bugs and holes and then release an update. It is up to you, however, to make sure that you are using the latest version of WordPress and installed plugins, and that you’ve done at least some maintenance checkups.

    Just a quick tip though, instead of installing a plugin see if you can edit the template files yourself to embed something like sharing buttons via a service like AddThis. A plugin automates the embedding of code within your site, but if you do it manually you will have more control and trust over what you have running.

  • http://twitter.com/UnchartedRadio Alistair Barnett

    TimThumb is not a WordPress Plugin, it’s a script. It’s not like anyone can just install and activate it like a normal plugin. Only someone who knows what they’re doing will be able to implement it, but of course someone could be using a theme that has built-in support for it. In either case, it’s simple enough to replace or fix the code when a vulnerability is known.

    Also, shouldn’t LockerGnome be using the latest version of WordPress? Yes, I realize that certain plugins (even though you hate them) may not be compatible and the UTF8 requirement is annoying, but you’re taking a huge risk by not having the latest security and bug fixes.