| VisionTek Killer HD5770 Combo Card |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Video Cards | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Written by Steven Iglesias-Hearst | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tuesday, 15 February 2011 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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DX11: Battlefield Bad Company 2The Battlefield franchise has been known to demand a lot from PC graphics hardware. DICE (Digital Illusions CE) has incorporated their Frostbite-1.5 game engine with Destruction-2.0 feature set with Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 features destructible environments using Frostbit Destruction-2.0, and adds gravitational bullet drop effects for projectiles shot from weapons at a long distance. The Frostbite-1.5 game engine used on Battlefield: Bad Company 2 consists of DirectX-10 primary graphics, with improved performance and softened dynamic shadows added for DirectX-11 users. At the time Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was published, DICE was also working on the Frostbite-2.0 game engine. This upcoming engine will include native support for DirectX-10.1 and DirectX-11, as well as parallelized processing support for 2-8 parallel threads. This will improve performance for users with an Intel Core-i7 processor. Unfortunately, the Extreme Edition Intel Core i7-980X six-core CPU with twelve threads will not see full utilization. In our benchmark tests of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the first three minutes of action in the single-player raft night scene are captured with FRAPS. Relative to the online multiplayer action, these frame rate results are nearly identical to daytime maps with the same video settings. The Frostbite-1.5 game engine in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 appears to equalize our test set of video cards, and despite AMD's sponsorship of the game it still plays well using any brand of graphics card.
Cost Analysis: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (1680x1050)Test Summary: Now is when we see some better looking numbers, the Killer HD5770 is still trailing by 4.7 FPS but playing at either of these resolutions is acceptable in the single player mode, there are some scenes of heavy action where you will notice the lag but overall it is playable. The multiplayer is somewhat different due to the more dynamic nature so some settings such as Anisotropic Filtering and Anti-Aliasing need to be lowered.
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Comments
If I put a mid range machine together again, I'm looking for cool and quiet just as much as performance. This one seems to miss on each of those details and the price has moved it beyond a range I'd be considering in a mid-range build.
A lot of people continue to cry foul and say it is just a placebo effect, but a lot of the high end gamers still pick one up since it does do a bit of cleaning and prioritizing of gaming traffic over other traffic while you are gaming. I do have a new Killer 2100 at home here to try but I have yet to have the time to open my rig and install it. Just too busy to deal with it as the comp also needs a bit of tweaking while I have her out.
Either way this card would be a prime candidate for a good crossfire setup to make it a potent little combo.
Also the cooling solution is similar to what VisionTek has been using on a lot of their card and it may make the system itself run a bit hotter since it vents into the case, it also cools the card a reasonable bit better than the stock reference design while also being quieter. What is the bummer is the 5700 series chip runs hotter than the 5800 series for whatever reason. It is the same chip used on the 5870M on laptops and they just get hot under load. The VT 5870 I own on my desktop has a very similar cooler (but more copper) but it idles at around 30-40C and under load never goes above the 70C's. A nice improvement over the older awesome yet super hot running 4800 series. (I had a VT 4870X2) It idled at 58C if the idle clocks were enabled, and under load it often hit 80+ with the VRM's themselves hitting 100C quite often on a lot of owners cards. They ran hot but ran great while they lasted.
A similar NIC can be had at less than $10.
A basic HD5770 less than $130.
Combined less than $140, which is way less than the $200 combo card.
The combo card is just about only worthwhile when you have a micro-ITX motherboard (only one expansion slot) *and* need the extra network speed *and* need fair graphics performance.
Value rating was based on buying a VisionTek HD5770 and a Killer NIC since there are no other VGA+NIC comparison products.
AS I pointed out in my article, this card is aimed at MMORPG / RTS players.
"Any old network card", as you put it, *will* do this. And when it comes to MMORPG gaming the LAN speed is fairly irrelevant, since the server typically doesn't reside within the player's LAN. The vast majority of players have 100 Mbps internet speed or less, which will bottleneck any NIC.
So for relevancy the comparison should also include a cheap, separate, network card, and it should be made towards some server on the internet, or at least on a 100Mbps LAN incapable of higher speeds. I have a hunch that the Killer card isn't decidedly faster in that situation...
All I wanted to find out was whether UDP transmission was faster on the Killer NIC than on my on-board NIC since game traffic relies on UDP protocol. Testing this on a LAN resricted to 100Mb/s won't prove asnything as it is still a LAN.
It will prove what happens when the top speed is governed by an external bottleneck. Restricting the speed to 10Mbps should be even more realistic, since that's closer to the real world limits.
Your own test showed that the motherboard's NIC ran both TCP and UDP at about 95 Mbps, which is what you get with a 100Mb restriction.
Since both NIC's are capable of near 100Mbps on TCP and UDP then the results would be equal and inconclusive.
The only real way to test would be to set up a game server and control the load on that server, connect to it with two identical machines at the same time (one with killer NIC one without) and record average frame rates and ping and also run the same test as detailed within this article.
My budget won't allow for that, so I test within my means.