The Killer NIC K1 Card
The initial Killer NIC card had a very unique look…let’s revive the memory here:
Original Killer NIC M1
The newer Killer NIC K1 is a bit less “outgoing” in order to save money in the sticker price of the card:
The new Killer NIC K1
As you can see, the K1 looks much more like a standard PCI networking card and less like a fashion statement! The hardware is very similar between the M1 and K1 cards though, with the lack of the heatsink and slightly down clocked processor because of it. The slower CPU though should make very little difference in our gaming performance testing.
There are still just two connections on the back of the Killer NIC K1: one 100 Mb Ethernet port and a single USB 2.0 port for use by the K1 card only. What is interesting is that BigFoot Networks is offering a card without support for FNApps — the feature that allows the network card to run its own applications without impacting your system’s processor. More on this on later pages.
Here we see the Freescale processor (with the K1 logo stuck over it) that runs at 300 MHz (versus the 400 MHz on the M1). The Broadcom PHY provides the networking connection to the NPU and the Xilinx programmable chip offers several features that the Killer NIC utilizes with its NPU.