Testbed and Methods
As was the case in some of our other reviews, testing the KillerNIC card required us to devise our very own testing methods. It is extremely difficult to test a product like the KillerNIC, due to the amount of variables present when testing something that uses the internet and has performance based off of internet usage. Furthermore, there is no established way for testing the product with any sort of completely repeatable results. As a result of these limitations, the results you see in this review will almost certainly be different than the results you will see in any other review of the product. It is a problem that is pretty much unavoidable, and we sincerely hope that you consider our test methods to be valid indicators of the KillerNIC’s performance.

We will be using our standard test bed for testing out the KillerNIC card. A detailed list of specifications can be found below:

Test setup

• Case: Vigor Force
• Power Supply: Antec NeoHE 550W
• Motherboard: Intel Desktop Board D975XBX (Bad Axe)
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800, 2933MHz
• Hard Drive: Western Digital 2500KS 7200RPM, 250GB with 16MB Cache Buffer
• Video: eVGA NVIDIA GeForce 7900GT KO Superclocked (580/1580)
• Memory: 1024MB (2x512MB) Corsair XMS2 PC2 6400 (TWIN2X1024A-6400)
• Optical Drive: Lite-ON SHW160P6S05
• Cooling: Thermaltake Big Typhoon
• Audio: Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic

Added

• NIC: Bigfoot Killer Network Interface Card

Software Configuration

• Motherboard BIOS: D975XBX Express BIOS Update (Rev. 1351)
• Operating System: Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2
• Video Driver: NVIDIA ForceWare Version 91.47 WHQL Certified (September 14 release)

Test Location

• Corona, CA (approximately 45 miles East Southeast of Los Angeles)

If you notice (or care), we have updated our software configuration since our review of the ASUS P1 PhysX card. The changes consist of a motherboard BIOS update to revision 1351 (released September 11) because we find it to be more stable, and because it fixed a boot issue we were having. Our video drivers have also been updated to the latest ForceWare version 91.47, because they fixed the black box bug present with previous releases of the 90 series.