FNA Application Performance

While testing the FNA applications I disabled all non vital background processes. This should ensure that the benchmarks are valid. The FNA applications are a great way to offload some applications from your CPU to the NPU on the KillerNIC. During my tests I became really fond of the FN Torrent program, this is really nice because it enables you to keep on gaming even while downloading. The FN Torrent program is great I used it to download benchmark programs from techPowerUp.com and several free Linux distributions for my Linux laptop. This little application is very useful because almost all large files on the net are available as torrent downloads. The torrent protocol is becoming increasingly popular because it can reduce download server traffic by interconnecting all peers which all share a bit of their upload speed which means that you can get the same download faster. Also the protocol adds redundancy because there is no centralized server that can go down.

Firewall

When the driver was installed I configured the FNA Firewall to suit my needs and then disabled the Windows firewall in order to test the effects of the FNA Firewall. I also blocked the port that BF2 uses just to test if it actually works and of course it did. The FNA Firewall didn't affect the performance of my PC at all just like the easy-going Windows Firewall. The difference between using the two isn't noticeable, however, I think that the FNA Firewall is harder to bypass because it's relatively unknown to hackers and runs Linux. So by using the FNA Firewall you should be a bit more safe on the net even though it probably doesn't support the same exact same features as the Windows Firewall.

BitTorrent Client

The FN Torrent program supplied with the card runs quite good. I was able to download from techPowerUp.com download servers to my thumb drive via the KillerNIC without affecting the load on my CPU at all. The only problem with the FN Torrent program is that it doesn't have all of the features that one would find in i.e. Azureus or uTorrent. In FN Torrent you have no control over how many connections the client establishes or if it utilizes decentralized tracking. This means that you can't really be sure whether other people can tab in when you make a private torrent between two computers to share large files like family photos or holiday videos. Another huge problem with the FN Torrent program is that you can't get a readout of how fast it's downloading the torrent, all you get is a little status bar where you can see how many percent the client has downloaded.

While downloading from techPowerUp.com download servers I timed the download to check how fast the FN Torrent program was. I measured roughly 0.5 MB/s. After that I downloaded from the same torrent although this time via uTorrent. By doing this the download speed was exactly the same (+-0.05 MB/s tolerance). Here the CPU load while downloading the torrent was raised from 0 % to approximately 7-10 %. This is due to the fact that the CPU takes care of the download instead of the KillerNIC's NPU and besides that your PC has to use some resources in order to get the data to and from the hard drive in your PC.

Just out of curiosity I tried downloading the exact same torrent via my normal integrated network card. To my surprise the increase in CPU load was about 3-5 %.

Now after you have downloaded a torrent via the KillerNIC to a thumb drive / external hard drive you can either press copy and via the FN Torrent program move data from thumb drive / external hard drive to your PC's hard drive or you can connect it to one of the USB ports on the back of your motherboard and get data off it the ordinary way.

Throughput Performance

I tested the throughput capabilities of the card with another PC with quite similar specs. To connect the two PCs I used a 1 meter long Cat 5E crossover cable.


I transfered a 4 GB file back and forth via Windows "Drag and Drop". It's clear that the KillerNIC can't keep up with my ordinary integrated network card. However it's unlikely that 89.2 MBit/s (0.8% slower) will ever become a real bottleneck for online gaming performance. And let's not forget that's what this particular card is designed for.

Ease Of Use

All of the FNA applications are really easy both to set up and use on a regular basis. The firewall has a simple GUI (Graphical User Interface) that enables both experienced and new users to configure the firewall. The FN Torrent is also really easy to use because it doesn't have all of the advanced functions of i.e. Azureus or uTorrent (which more advanced users will miss of course). When using the FNA applications all you have to is right click the Killer tray icon and set the card to Application mode and then launch the FNA application.