Bigfoot Killer Wireless-N 1102

So apparently Sager and a few resellers have ninja-ed this chip into their configurations. What makes this different than say the Intel Ultimate-N 6300, and is it worth the $5 premium to sacrifice that 3rd antenna that the 6300 has?

 

According to Xotic, the BF Killer has 3 antennae. If I'm not wrong, the Intel 6300 goes up to 450mbps, compared to 300mbps for the BF Killer (which is the same as the Intel 6230). That being said, to achieve those speeds, you will need both an internet connection, as well as a router, that actually does that.

 

Hmm, it says on their website that the 1103 is coming out Q2. I did alittle more research and found that the 1102 is capped at 300 while the 1103 has 450. Most likely though I'll just stick with the 1102 though.

 

are there any reviews on it? how is their support?

 

like the 6300, no BT correct? i'd sacrifice bt for a better wifi card

edit: didnt view the 6300 as a worthy upgrade for losing bt.. if this BF killer improves connections for even non-wireless N speeds, i'd take it

 

Everything you need to know about it: Bigfoot brings Killer bandwidth management to laptops via Wireless N module -- Engadget

 

Doesn't answer if its better than the 6300...

 

Exactly. I usually have multiple youtube/netflix/hulu videos running and if this card will do a better job of making sure they don't stutter, it's worthwhile.

 

Yeah me too especially since even though I have an N router, running at 5GHz for N, my internet sucks and I never get close to N speeds Also I use it at school alot where wireless strength varies a great deal...

 

me dos.. i'd do anything for a better wifi signal at school lol.. it's actually pretty good right now.. chillin in eco class. gettin 36mbps w/ 4/5 bars.

actuallly now that i think about it, i've been getting a lot better wifi reception since dell came and replaced the motherboard. picked up wifi from the lobby downstairs from my room on the 5th floor last night.. of course that's cuz one wall of my room is practically a giant window. but i never had this happen before. was very pleasant experience considering our wired speeds are capped at like 10 or 15 mbps

 

Well I'm reading 50pgs about the media conglomerations and getting 6down/3.6up/. Not spectacular, but gets the job done. All I need is range and heavy video capabilities.

 

Enjoy that while you have it... I'm lucky if I get 50kbps when I get home from Time Warner... I occasionally get up to 300 in the early morning though... Calling them to complain doesn't help, NYC is just too overloaded...

 

That's just what we're told we have lol

I'll edit in a bit to show the results of my speedtest

edit:
SPEEDTEST.NET
.49mb/s download
2.81 mb/s upload
52ms ping
PINGTEST.NET
line quality: F
ping: 87ms
jitter: 130ms
packet loss: 96%

 

I just pre-ordered a Sager with Intel Ultimate-N. Today I see that XoticPC added Bigfoot. What to do? Is the extra $5 worth it?

 

thats what we're trying to determine

 

I humbly apologize I corrected my post shortly after my post. The current BF Killer is a 2 Antenna Card, the 3 Antenna will be out Q2.

Here are some numbers comparing it to the 6200:

Simultaneous Video Load (as posted earlier)
Killer 1 Freeze 2:40mins
6200 11 Freeze's 18mins
Broadcom 4322 8 Freezes 8 mins

Throughput Comparison (TCP Throughput in Mbps (MTU=1020)
)
Killer 25' 157 50' 155 75' 106 100' 72
6200 25' 104 50' 99 75' 72 100' 69

 

What does this mean (in layman's terms)?

 

Yeah, I really don't understand that chart either...

 

That sounds horrific. My home service is through TWC and I get 25 down/ 4 up pretty much consistently. Doesn't hold a candle to my college or work internet, but it's not bad for home broadband.

Ugh, so sorry my friend. Our campus just upgraded to all Wireless N access points and ran gigabit to every dorm and apartment jack. Since my apartment was on campus, all of campus was essentially a giant LAN. I could pull movies off the server in my apartment at 100MB/s or better if I wired in, 1/3 that over wifi. I'll miss that living off campus...

If you guys really want to be jealous though, check out this thread from reddit. Some people get 300 up/300 down at *home*. Or 997 down/ 2 up at school

 

On the first it was under the following condition
4 Torrents and streaming a video. They calculate how many "freezes" the Video Had and how long it to to download & play.

On the second it is measuring the throughput in Mbps, (the average rate of successful message/data delivery) @ different ranges from the router.

 

Simultaneous Video Load: The killer only "freezes" (stops playback to buffer) once, total time to get the video is 2 minutes 40 seconds ( I believe this was an HD Scott Pilgrim Trailer, but I don't have the other thread open).

The 6200 stops 11 times and takes 18 minutes (that seems high to me, possible typo?)

The broadcom stops 8 times and takes 8 minutes to play the video

Throughput comparison: This is easy to determine, but you need to know some acronyms. TCP: transmission control protocol. Without saying much, this is what most network traffic is. MTU: Maximum Transmission Unit, or the size in bytes that your network frame is (traffic is broken up into many, many frames). The standard MTU for ethernet is 1500 bytes. No idea why they used a random size like 1020. (Well, I do have an idea. It's to skew the graphs. No one runs at that size unless it's intentional. It means you need far more frames to transmit the same data, so they can make it look like they're much much faster than they really are when comparing apples to apples. Standard wireless is quite good at passing the 1500 byte frames) I'd only trust this if they upped the MTU.

Basically they're trying to show at closer range (25 feet), the killer averages 157mbps while the 6200 can only reach the slower 104mpbs. At 75 feet it still manages to keep a lead, 106mpbs vs 72mps. They apparently equal at about 100 feet, which is the maximum useable range of most wireless N access points.

I'd take most wireless stuff with a grain of salt though. I've been doing this for years in college. You have too many unknowns with it to calculate well. Wireless is inherently latent, due to the nature of CSMA-CA for collision detection over the air versus CSMA-CD over a full duplex switched network.

If you really really want to hear the in depth of this, PM me, lol .

Basically, the killer card is using a bit of number fudging and settings changes to look better than it is. Real world performance will make a big difference due to a number of factors (not the least of which is the access point you're using and the other devices using it).

As a networking major working for Cisco in wireless and enterprise routing and switching, I feel I can answer this. Look above for layman terms.

EDIT: I also didn't point out that while 1500 bytes is the standard MTU, Wireless N can technically support up to 2272 bytes depending on hardware. This means roughly 2.5x fewer frames to move the same data (when taking into account the overhead on each frame that is removed in the process). The problem is that this was never widely adopted outside of Jumbo frames, and because in most networks wireless and wired coexist, so sharing the 1500 MTU is common.

 

Ah, that explains my inconsistencies then.

It sounds like the killer card has some out of the box QoS (quality of service) policies in place to put media ahead of P2P applications. I don't think it's any stronger on the hardware, but more reliant on the software QoS settings here. This is stuff you can set on your router and achieve regardless of the wireless connection. I do this at home with my home access point and Cisco router. QoS is easy to implement there and would make a much better network-wide improvement.

The problem with running that test is that they probably did so on a network with only one host (themselves). In the real world, you're going to be on crowded access points where other users are pulling down a ton of bandwidth (cough, college). That killer card is going to do nothing about getting you extra bandwidth. It's going to help prioritize the traffic leaving your machine, but it can't give you what doesn't exist.

I think in all, they are giving you a standard wireless adaptor with good QoS and possibly better integration with the Windows TCP/IP stack so that they can trim out the unnecessary latency.

In my professional opinion, the 6300 is probably a better choice (because you get the same basic speeds, can configure your own QoS and get possible WiDi support- assuming we aren't talking about the 8130 or 8150/8170).

 

What would you suggest to maximize your chances of getting the best connection on a campus then?

 

Other than getting to know your campus network administrator? Well, the best methods aren't exactly ones that make your campus IT happy. Some guys at college used to carry along routers to bridge the network since they had much stronger radios in them (the school got wise and started a whitelist, so it'd ban the rogue AP's. They've since banned all third party wireless access points).

The main problem with campus (or problems, really) 1) too many people per access point, you just drown them with requests 2) some jerks are still using 802.11b equipment which drops the speeds on the access point for EVERYONE down to 11mb/s standard 3) network speeds are throttled and ports are blocked.

For the most part, you're out of luck. You can try to increase range and speed on your end as much as you want, but most of the blame lies squarely on your terrible infrastructure. Some people find it's less hassle to tether their phones for internet, or at least they did before we got our school-wide wireless N rollout.

If your school has wireless N though, there are a few things you can try with your current hardware to try to bump the speeds up (or with any N card). This works in all versions of Windows, not sure about the linux settings though:

Right click your network icon > network and sharing center >change adapter settings (or if on XP, control panel, network adapters)

Right click your wireless adapter > properties > configure > advanced

You should have a list of options.

The big ones to check are:
1) 802.11n channel width for x (either 2.4 or 5.0 if your card supports it). Default is 20mhz. Change this to Auto, so that you can get the whole 40mhz band if it's available.
2) 802.11n mode - should be enabled.
3) Roaming aggressiveness - at least medium or higher, that way your adapter will always try to get the best signal
4) Throughput enhancement - enabled if it's an option. Your adapter will try to use compression when possible to speed up transfers
5) transmit power - should be at maximum

This is the best you can do to optimize driver settings on your end. If you go back to the adapter settings, you can right click > status. (come to think of it, you should check this before doing anything so that you can see what connection speed you've got). Before optimizing I tend to only connect to my home Wireless N router at 130mb/s with my intel 5300 card (it's the last generation 6300 with 3 antennas). After optimization I get 300mp/s consistently.

This only affects the speed at which you *can* get connection though. If the routers at your school are bad, well.. you're out of luck. The 6230 and the 6300 are great options because they extend your range and speed and allow you to possibly pick up less congested AP's. Even better is that they support 5ghz bands, I believe. If your school or home AP runs on this spectrum it's likely to be less congested than the 2.4 band that most wireless networks are on. While 5ghz has shorter effective range than 2.4, it offers less congestion and higher overall data speeds. (802.11a used this frequency back in the day). It also gets you out of the range of the cordless phones/microwaves/etc that are also on that band.

Short answer: run some tweaks, buy a decent card, try to find the best AP you can. Finding a good connection is still a crapshoot and there is only so much you can do without having a better access point.

 

Well, I use it in 2 places, school and home. Work I can't connect so for school either is better than my current. For home neither matters because time Warner disconnects me after 26 mb of torrent traffic... Takes me like 5 tries to patch starcraft and 5 router ip renews...

I also understood more of your post than I should be comfortable admitting...

That said my school is mug faster than home.

 

I tried to keep it as simple as possible, glad I succeeded In truth, it's horrifically more complicated than this. I could get into dBs of signal strength and attenuation sources and fun acronyms like CSMA-CA, MIMO, SYN/ACK, 802.11 IEEE standards, etc. But for most people, cutting out the technical nonsense is a plus

(PS, Wireless courses in college are awesome, but you still can't beat high speed wired connections. I'm hoping to upgrade my home network to 10GB as soon as the cost of NIC's becomes reasonable. I'd prefer not to have to run fiber, but copper 10GB is still troublesome...)

 

Thanks for the tip, I tweaked a few settings, I'll let you know how the settings help out.



+Rep!

 

Shhh... If I know too much networking it will get harder for me to blame issues with the apps I own on network issues with a straight face!

 

Epsilon, you mentioned that if other people are on a older signal (a/b/g) that will slow down the speeds for everyone on the wireless signal. My question is, say I get a simultaneous dual-band router would it be better if my roommates are on the 2.4 signal, while I'm on the 5.0? Is it possible?

 

Yes you can run N on 5ghz and put b on 2.4 it gives you faster N too.


Adding a quick Q of my own...
I use 5ghz N and my wife uses the 2.4 for G. I have a better connection to the router but she gets more of the bandwith for streaming video than I do for RDP to work at night even though I set my router to prioritize my Mac address... Problem is I have to ask her to get off or my work session gets unresponsive...

 

No reason why you couldn't. Dual bands would isolate you. That setup is used by quite a few people I know. Most routers will even let you set it up so that there isn't any routing between the two (AKA, fully isolated). You just have to make sure when you're looking for a router, that it doesn't just say dual band. It has to specifically say simultaneous dual band (or similar wording). By staying on 5ghz by yourself, you'll get the faster of the two connections due to less congestion and interference, but like I said, it will cut down on range, especially if that area is not mostly open. 5ghz attenuates quickly when it has to go through walls and other objects.

 

Thanks. I'm going to live with 3 other people who I highly doubt have a N capable card and I don't want that to slow speeds down. As far as walls go, I'm gonna fight for the router to be in my room, unless there is no port in my room. At most there will be one wall between the router and the laptop. As for the router, do you have any opinions on the cisco linksys e3000 vs e4200?

 

Sorry if this has already been answered, but does this card allow for any possible bluetooth?

 

I don't get a chance to use the consumer end Cisco gear at work (I deal entirely in enterprise equipment like standalone 1242 access points, etc), but I'd go with the 4200. You can get 300mpbs on the 2.4ghz and 450mbs on the 5ghz (simultaneously!). The E3000 only gives you 300mbps on both frequencies. It's also a UPnP server, so you can hook up external harddrives or another usb storage device and turn it into network attached storage as well.

Jeeze, those are both expensive routers though. (Way to go Cisco, continually charging too much for them). Newegg seems to have the E3000 for $125 and Bestbuy has the E4200 for $179. My work discount can possibly get them for $112 and $126, respectively which is a nice drop...(Dang it, now I might pick up the E4200 for home too since buying one of the enterprise versions for my networking rack is around $500 through EPP)

 

yeah i would like to know this as well, and does the 1102 get better range and signal strength compared to the intel 6230 and the 6300?

 

From what I've heard, no bluetooth

 

Yes, there is no bluetooth in the killer card, along with the intel 6300 (just in case anyone really wants bluetooth).

 

Is Intel's 6300 more reliable than the Killers card? I just switched back to the 6300.

 

I just trust Intel cards more than the Killer cards. Everyone has intel cards, so they must be doing something right otherwise we wouldn't all be buying them . Besides, imo, Killer seems to be making their cards more worthwhile than they really are with fancy marketing numbers. Also, in the end, a great card on a crappy signal, is the same. So, in the end it might not matter at all.

 

Thats how i feel about it. I'd rather take reliability over bloated numbers.

 

I've never used one of the Killer cards, but they're marketing is bunk. It's either spin or stuff you can do with 10 minutes in your router configuration or card properties. It's hardly worth the extra money. I've been quite happy with my Intel 5300 wifi in my old laptop, and it's served well for quite a while. The 6230 should also do just fine since I want bluetooth.

 

K, im gonna leave my configuration as is (6300)

 

I switched back to Intels 6300.

 

bumped up to the 6300.. thanks for the info Epsilon! prolly will pm you if i have further networking questions

 

i guess i join the party too and pick the 6300 since im looking for better signal range and strength thru concrete and brick walls, now i just need to find a bluetooth 3.0+hs adapter

 

yeah, 6300 is the way to go

 

Want to give a few pointers on things that I could tweak in 'card properties'?

 

My understanding is that the Killer has its own TCP/IP stack and a dedicated processor. I really think it's crap. I'd rather trust Microsoft's stack than a small third party company, and I'm pretty sure the last thing anyone needs is a dedicated network processor. Also, the hype and marketspeak they use is insulting.

I think you're fine. Leave everything as it is. I wouldn't try tweaking anything for a 1% performance increase. You'll probably be limited by your signal strength or other people sharing the connection. Get a solid Intel card (and I think for the vast majority of people any will do) and worry about other, more important, things.

 

Alright, thanks. Only thing that's bugging me now is 6300 vs 6230 (which has bluetooth).

 

Do you need the 3x3 antennas of the 6300? Does your router have a 3x3 antenna setup? I'm guessing not, but you may want to check. If your router is 2x2 then there's no point at all to getting a 6300 unless you plan to get a 3x3 router in the future. And if you have a 3x3 router do you need that extra bandwidth (which would be useful on a LAN, streaming from a server in the den to a HTPC in the living room, say)?

I'd say if you're just surfing the Web then there's no point in getting the 6300. It sounds like you want Bluetooth too so, model numbers be dammed, perhaps the 6230 would be a good fit for you.