14 DAY TRIAL // Why would anyone pay $179.99 or $249.99 for a network interface card? Could it be because of the daring attempt to actually make something like this work or by integrating a lot of functions into a single card, as I've seen before? Not that it wouldn't be nice to get the CPU load down from the Internet and onto the game you are playing, but that's a lot of money they're asking for it.
The concept of having a network card that powerful is a revolutionary one, I'll give you that, but the people who are buying something like this are either control freaks, who like to take everything into their own hands, or deranged enthusiasts who spend too much time in front of the computer to actually realize there is something else besides the Internet on this world.
I think your mind must be a little bit of course if you actually put the words "playing a game" and "downloading stuff off the Internet" in the same sentence and the outcome makes sense. And a part of the blame for this goes to the manufacturers of this NIC, because there are some things that you can't just mix and hope they will turn out right. One of those things includes gaming while downloading, and I'll elaborate on that.
If you download something from the Internet, that means your hard drive is being used and if that something is very large and you downloaded really fast thanks to your Killer NIC, then you still might lose some framerate in that game you were playing because the information processed by the processor, the memory and the video card is stored on, guess what, the same hard drive.
Ok, so they have introduced a BitTorrent Flexible Network Architecture (FNA) which integrates a BitTorrent client, allowing you to download things on your computer. And the NIC also has its dedicated processing unit and memory, allowing it to bypass the Windows Networking Stack, well, here's an idea for you. I've seen a wireless router with a BitTorrent integrated client and, get this, a hard drive. It's about $259.99, depending on where you buy it from, nice deal, isn't it?