gentoo with Bigfoot Network's Killer NIC

[zzaappp]

Has anyone made this network card work with Gentoo?

http://www.bigfootnetworks.com/

It isn't a cheap card so I want to find out for sure it will work before I sink the bread into it.

-z

[NeddySeagoon]

zzaappp,

It looks like a waste of money to me. Its a coprocessor to handle networking.
It can only improve the time to get data into and out of your PC, which is already very small compared to the total ping time for a game server.
You can't do anything about the external times at all, except find a game server with a lower ping. Its offering to reduce an already small part of the total ping time.

Look at traffic shaping and quality of service, in the kernel if you want to prioritise your game network traffic. In linux, its there for free, I'm not sure if windows XP provides this as its normally a server or router feature. This only useful if you are using the network for other things while you game.

If you have a dual core or dual CPU system, linux will already offload a lot of kernel activity to the second CPU, so your networking already works the way that card proposes. Windows probably does that too.

While little or nothing in the white paper is factually incorrect, it does make a number of unsubstansiated claims and there are no numbers to back up any of the assertions.

Your money will be better spent on a dual core or dual CPU system (if you don't already have one) than a specialised network processor.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.