Guide: Turn your Killer E2200 NIC into Qualcomm Atheros AR8161

[eidairaman1]

Never like atheros controllers

 

[Shou Miko]

Never like atheros controllers

well me neither but after Quadcomm has taken over, it just works better for me dunno if it's a illusion or just bcs of their success in the smartphone world with their SnapDragon chipset ^^

 

[remixedcat]

Never like atheros controllers

What are your fav?

 

[eidairaman1]

Course intel and w/e came on my old dfi mobo. Ive just had several customers laptops or desktops come in with an atheros chip that either completely dumped the driver or it just stopped working...

 

[remixedcat]

I only have one atheros WLAN in my house the rest are either Realtek based (Amped and the Toshiba laptop) or RA-Link based (Netgear and 2 of my laptop's built in) and they both are decent.

 

[W1zzard]

Thank you! I used this guide during setup of our new Z97-based SSD Bench.

 

[bigflyer]

I just got a new MSI GT70 laptop yesterday which has the Killer E2200. First thing I did was to upgrade to Windows to 8.1 Professional. Then I began downloading games through Steam/Origin.

As I downloaded my RAM would soon reach 8GB out of 8GB in use... and the laptop would come to a near complete standstill. My cursor would skip around the screen, but could not get anything to function.

I'm in exactly the same situation. The driver uses up RAM from the 'non-paged pool'. Within about 10 minutes, it would have used 1GB, and go up and up..

Switching to the stock drivers seems to have fixed the problem, at least for now.

(It's interesting that the release notes for the latest drivers from Qualcomm for the Killer Wireless card say "now using base Atheros drivers" - so I guess that was as bad, but they haven't yet got around to taking the wired NIC drivers back to the base drivers as well)

 

[Shou Miko]

bigflyer i don't have a Killer wireless card in my laptop i have a Intel Wireless AC-7260 card.

but there may be a solution for the wireless too, but i can't test that out...

 

[grpocz]

I created...this account...just to thank you for your guide!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My problem was running games together with VOIP programs built in or side by side...some examples were

Garenatalk together with League of Legends MASSIVE ping spike str8 up to 5k-19k
Dota 2 unplayable once you enter the map again massive ping spike the moment u enter the map
Skype together with League of Legends massive ping spike as well

I updated the drivers following ur guide and everything was fine! I played dota 2 had skype on used garenatalk and open LoL all concurrently just to test the lag and there was none.

My computer specs are MSI h97 gaming 3 mobo

May I ask how do I remove the remnants of this Killer Ethernet piece of junk? it still has its program running when my computer starts up the one where it monitors your computer internet usage. Thanks man!!

 

[Shou Miko]

I created...this account...just to thank you for your guide!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My problem was running games together with VOIP programs built in or side by side...some examples were

Garenatalk together with League of Legends MASSIVE ping spike str8 up to 5k-19k
Dota 2 unplayable once you enter the map again massive ping spike the moment u enter the map
Skype together with League of Legends massive ping spike as well

I updated the drivers following ur guide and everything was fine! I played dota 2 had skype on used garenatalk and open LoL all concurrently just to test the lag and there was none.

My computer specs are MSI h97 gaming 3 mobo

May I ask how do I remove the remnants of this Killer Ethernet piece of junk? it still has its program running when my computer starts up the one where it monitors your computer internet usage. Thanks man!!

I personally use a program called Your Uninstaller to remove programs with bcs it also cheek Windows' registration database for left overs, and if it fibs anything u can mark then and remove them.

 

[newtekie1]

Awesome, just used this guide to get the NIC working on my ASRock Z79X-Killer board under Windows 2012!

 

[pish180]

This was very helpful! Thanks!


I have an MSI GT70 and I configured a HostedNetwork using the KillerNic E2200 drivers. Every time I would connect a wireless device to the hostednetwork my laptop would blue-screen. I tried several things including updating the drivers to the latest versions and using older ones.

Finally I changed the drivers out to the AR8161 drivers and with everything configured the same, the hostednetwork works perfectly. No more BSOD!

Also the Qualcomm driver download page is confusing... so this was useful.

Thanks!

 

[Per Hansson]

This might be of interest to someone:
The PCI Vendor & Device listed on my Gigabyte GA-Z97X-Gaming 3 mainboard for the Killer NIC is:
PCI\VEN_1969&DEV_E091&SUBSYS_E0001458

Looking in the driver INF there is one device which is almost a perfect match, on line 950 in driver v2.1.0.21 for Win7 x64:
PCI\VEN_1969&DEV_1091&SUBSYS_E0001458

Changing that one character allows the driver to install without using the "have disk" method, so it's simpler.
The negative thing is that since you modify the file the certificate no longer matches so you don't get it listed as a WHQL driver.
And you also get the respective warning for this during installation...

P.S: The E091 Device ID is not listed on the PCI Database, but 1091 is...

EDIT: For me the killer reason to change driver was during driver installation & setup.
My native language is Swedish but most of the time I select English for the user interface.
It's simply put just easier for me to understand a good English compared to a crappy Swedish translation.
As this PC was for my brother though I elected to install a Swedish Windows 7, but I still selected English language for the driver.
To my surprise when it was done it was in Swedish anyway, and the grammar was so poor that I literally laughed out loud!
Not one sentence was right, not even when hovering the mouse over the icon in the taskbar!
The final nail in the coffin was after the mandatory reboot the thing wanted me to do a bandwidth test to autoconfigure the settings.
At first I thought no because my brother is on ADSL while I'm on 100Mbps fiber so the test would be pointless; better to do it at his place...
But I was still curious so I pressed "next" then I got a failure message saying I needed Adobe Flash!
So get this, the driver is 90MB zipped, and it requires Adobe Flash!?
My hatred for Flash is quite deeply rooted so that was the last I saw before killing off the "driver"

And here is a small tip now that you managed to read this far.
By far the biggest reason the Killer NIC shows any advantage is because it changes a setting in the Windows registry related to how packets should be sent. (TcpAckFrequency).
This can of course be changed by you without their silly Flash Based application, see link below
http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info13581-LeatrixLatencyFix.html

 

[John Freiman]

I have an MSI A88XM GAMING motherboard and purchased it for it's compatibility with thee AMD Kaveri APU, it's 4 PCIe slots and it's rare inclusion of integrated Display Port.

I use this board in my Windows Media Center builds because of the balance of power, transcoding and lots of available and usable slots -- the "Killer NIC" sounded like a bonus.

The Killer NIC lived up to it's name because I later discovered that the software bundle "required" for the Killer e2200 "killed" my network tv tuners.

I include in these systems Ceton InfiniTV PCIe cable tuner card(s) and/or InfiniTV ETH and for some reason, the added software require for the "killer" installation created an unreliable environment for these network cable tuners.

Before finding this post, and trying everything that the MSI "tech support" (lousy) offered as a solution I purchased a cheap $15 NIC, disabled the Killer drivers and my system became stable again. (now I have my PCIe slots available again for future growth/expansion)

After more research focused specifically on the Killer NIC and trying to find a WHQL driver for it I found this Forum post by puma99dk on TPU and all my problems are now a thing of the past!

Now if I could only get the Windows 8.1 install to automatically load and install the 8161 drivers building new HTPCs would be a breeze!
side note: happily, there is no auto install of the Killer software bundle, ie driver either!

 

[Shou Miko]

hehe, i am happy you liked it John, it's nice to hear awesome feedback, plus i use thise method on my MSI Z97I Gaming AC board, bcs i don't really need gaming priority and software to control it, or Windows doing something, i just need the nic to be normal

 

[erocker]

I'm using a MSI Z97 Gaming 7 and this controller is awful. I've tried doing the tutorial and I still have issues, especially with games. It also seems to want to install the 8131 drivers instead of the 8161's.

 

[RCoon]

I'm using a MSI Z97 Gaming 7 and this controller is awful. I've tried doing the tutorial and I still have issues, especially with games. It also seems to want to install the 8131 drivers instead of the 8161's.

The tutorial shows a slightly different number system to mine, but it was easy enough to work out I needed the higher number (8132). Mine works fine as an atheros chip, the Killer app was really starting to irritate me. But yeah, 813x seems to be the newer chips driver requirement.

 

[erocker]

The tutorial shows a slightly different number system to mine, but it was easy enough to work out I needed the higher number (8132). Mine works fine as an atheros chip, the Killer app was really starting to irritate me. But yeah, 813x seems to be the newer chips driver requirement.

I actually got 8161 to work. I had the killer driver uninstalled when I first tried. I tried it with it installed and it showed up. Still having lots of issues with connectivity though.

 

[RCoon]

I actually got 8161 to work. I had the killer driver uninstalled when I first tried. I tried it with it installed and it showed up. Still having lots of issues with connectivity though.

Mines on Z87, so perhaps there's a variance, but otherwise my connection has been 100% solid since switching over. Not really a fan of the chips in general. Would have preferred a basic 1Gbit Intel port.

 

[Shou Miko]

i use the AR8161 with my MSI Z97I Gaming AC board that has the killer e2205 nic on it and i don't have any issues at all.

I am running Bios v1.3.

 

[erocker]

Yeah, not sure what to do other than go buy a network card at this point.

 

[Shou Miko]

Yeah, not sure what to do other than go buy a network card at this point.

could it be a bad ethernet chip or, a conflict in the driver or maybe down to the bios?

 

[erocker]

could it be a bad ethernet chip or, a conflict in the driver or maybe down to the bios?

It could of coincidentally been my ISP things seem much better this morning, so all that headache for nothing lol.

 

[EarthDog]

the Killer E2200 NIC is build to let gaming come first, the Qualcomm Athero AR8161 is a regular NIC.

But if there isn't any gaming, doesn't it STOP shaping the traffic?

I think this is a great workaround, but I am just not sure what it is a workaround for...I run on the Killer NIC across a couple of platforms with seemingly no problems.

 

[erocker]

But if there isn't any gaming, doesn't it STOP shaping the traffic?

I think this is a great workaround, but I am just not sure what it is a workaround for...I run on the Killer NIC across a couple of platforms with seemingly no problems.

A lot of people were having problems with stability of the software. Actually, you can just go into the network adapter properties and turn off shaping. That being said the Killer app is just bad. I'm currently running with just the normal driver (installed through the device manager) and things are working good.