1. Introduction2. The VisionTek Killer 2100 HD 57703. Testing Methodology4. Game Network Efficiency (GANE) Testing5. NetPerf Testing6. Real World Network Testing7. Colin McRae Dirt 28. Alien V Predator9. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam10. Just Cause 211. Crysis Warhead12. Far Cry 213. Metro 203314. Thermal Dynamics15. Acoustics Performance16. Power Consumption17. Overclocking18. Closing Thoughts19. View All Pages

Today we are going to be looking at a hybrid graphics/network card, featuring an amalgamation of technology from AMD and Bigfoot Networks. This card from VisionTek combines a 1GB HD5770 with a KillerNic 2100 to offer lower ping times with decent mainstream gaming performance.

Focusing on high end graphics solutions is fun, after all everyone loves to marvel at cutting edge hardware churning out ludicrous frame rates. At the end of the day however, this market brings in such a small amount of revenue for AMD or nVidia. The real money is earned much lower down.

We always liked AMD's HD5770, sure it wasn't a gaming tour de force, but it could generate reasonable frame rates at HD resolutions without breaking the bank. Additionally, the hardware ran cool, required very little power at the socket and with the help of third party coolers, didn't generate much noise.

While this particular card we are looking at today isn't being officially sold in retail stores in the United Kingdom it can be brought in via import. Our North American readers can purchase it from stores such as Frys, Best Buy, Comp USA and Walmart for around $195.

Specifications

• Powered by Radeon™ HD5770
• Powered by Bigfoot Killer™ E2100
• 1GB GDDR5 memory
• 400MHz NPU
• Compliant with DirectX® 11 and earlier revisions
• Supports OpenGL 3.1
• ATI Avivo™ HD video and display technology1
• Dynamic power management with ATI PowerPlay™ technology7
• PCI Express® 2.0 support
• Speed: 10/100/1000 Mbps

The VisionTek Killer HD arrives in a white and red accented box, resplendent with WarHammer 40,000: Dawn Of War 2 graphics.

The bundle contains a video converter, power adapter cable, Crossfire connector and software disc, with drivers for both the graphics card and Killer E2100 networking adapter. Official AMD drivers also fully support the graphics hardware.

The card is supplied with a custom cooler and a Killer HD5770/Dawn Of War 2 sticker. If you look carefully under the raised cooler the Killer Nic chip can be seen.

The memory on the card is Elpida W1032BABG which is rated at 1ns with speeds up to 5.0Gbps.

The card features two dual link DVI-I ports, single HDMI with audio support, and a 10/100/1000 LAN connection. The card requires a single 6 pin PCIe connector for power.

The cooler is substantial with aluminum fins protruding from the copper base.

The card is based around a traditional red PCB with the Juniper core offset to the right of the board design, leaving room for the KillerNic E2100 to the left. The PCB design is very clean with good placement, allowing the large fan to cool all the components.

The card is clocked at AMD's recommended reference speeds. 850mhz on the core and 1200mhz (4800mhz effective) via the GDDR5 memory. This memory interface is 128bit.

Above, we can see the VisionTek Killer HD5770 positioned next to the Bigfoot Killer 2100 NIC. It certainly is a space saving feature to have it embedded into the graphics card.

For testing today we are using our high end AMD system, based around the excellent six core Phenom II X6 1100T processor clocked to 4GHZ.

System validation is available here.

Review Test System:
Processor: AMD Phenom II X6 1100T
Motherboard: MSI 890 GXM-G65
Cooling: Noctua NH D14 (with extra 140mm Noctua fan)
Memory: Kingston 8GB DDR3 @ 1600mhz
Chassis: Antec Dark Fleet DF85
Power Supply: Antec High Current Gamer 900W
Monitor: Dell U2410

Software:
Windows 7 64 Bit
FRAPS
Catalyst 11.1 WHQL
Colin McRae Dirt 2
Alien V Predator
Battlefield: Bad Company 2
Just Cause 2
Crysis Warhead
Far Cry 2
Metro 2033

Technical Monitoring and Test Equipment:
Keithley Integra unit
Thermal Diodes
Raytek Laser Temp Gun 3i LSRC/MT4 Mini Temp
Extech digital sound level meter & SkyTronic DSL 2 Digital Sound Level Meter
Kill A Watt Meter

All results are gained from multiple test runs to ensure any abnormalities are removed before publication.

Before we get into game testing we wanted to analyse the performance of the onboard Killer NIC.

Firstly, we need to discuss Latency V Throughput. Latency is commonly refered to as ‘Lag’. This is a measurement of delay for a network packet or series of packets. Latency is a good measure of the real speed of your network or Internet connection – low numbers indicate fast networking.

Throughput is different, because this is a measure of bandwidth, basically how much data can be delivered to its destination. This is often the system by which consumer Internet connections are classified and priced.

It is important to understand that Latency does not measure Throughput. 30Mbps might seem like its a service ‘speed’ but in actuality its explaining what bandwidth is available to a connection. Standard networking devices are designed to maximise throughput. They are not however designed or optimised to lower latency for online games.

When you play a game online you might think its using 8mbit of your bandwidth, but in reality you will often find its hovering around 25-100kbps. Sometimes if you are playing a game and you notice lagging, its not that your connection isn’t handling massive amounts of data its that the packet delays are causing lag and therefore game responsiveness.

The Game Networking DNA Technology that is utilised in the BigFoot Killer Nic product is tuned to reduce latency, therefore optimising the gaming connection you experience when online. Subsequently it would make sense that with this technology you could experience smoother game play while the machine is multitasking in the background.

Installing the card is a straightforward enough process, you insert a CD and install the driver – before driver installation Windows 7 reports the product as a PowerPC based product.

Interestingly, We had a standalone KillerNic 2100 installed before we used this card, but the Visiontek product requires a special driver available on the Visiontek software disc.

Driver installation only takes a few minutes and the firmware on the card is updated. This is a similar procedure to the standalone product.

It is important you don't turn the machine off during this installation or the onboard NIC could get damaged.

The standalone software suite available from the Bigfoot Networks website works fine with the onboard NIC, highlighting all the options available to the end user. This software really is excellent.

The first test we decided to use was the Game Network Efficiency (GANE) Test, which is in place to simulate real world network performance for online PC games. This test is used to create a gaming load on a Windows PC as well as transmission of gaming network traffic over a local network. This test is also designed to test two network cards at once making direct comparisons between both at the same time.

The setup is a little complex, but ill describe it in a step by step manner.

Firstly you connect the host (listen/server) PC to a gigabit switch through the standard onboard gigabit ethernet connection. The Killer 2100 is then installed on the other test PC and it is connected to the gigabit switch via both the Killer Network gaming card and the onboard NIC.

On the server PC we then configure the properties of the onboard network card to have a static IP address. We then adjust the subnet mask to 255.255.255.0. The test PC is then configured in a similar manner, but we assign different static IP’s to both the onboard NIC and the Killer 2100. Again the subnet mask is set to 255.255.255.0.

On the main test PC we then go into advanced via the IPv3 properties window.  We then uncheck the ‘Automatic Metric” box and set the metric value to “1″. Both cards need this applied as the NIC uses it to send network traffic. If we leave this setting at ‘automatic’, Windows does not alternate between the NICs and instead will send all the traffic through one card rendering the test useless.

The next stage is to run GANE on both the server/listen PC and the main test rig. GANE measures then compares latency between two network cards installed on any PC. This is handled by a procedure of sending 100 byte packets over the local network on a round trip, every 50ms. Kitguru has selected 100bytes as the packet size because this is a good real world representation of a standard network packet. We want to run this size specifically to test Bigfoot's claims that many network cards are not optimised for this ‘game’ related data packet size.

While we set up the server PC we also need to run a game benchmark on the main PC and in this case we will use Resident Evil 5 in DX10 mode with the built in benchmark at maximum settings on our screen at 1920×1200 resolution. While we are running this, we are sending packets between both NICs on the main PC to the receiving (listening) PC. This mirrors a real life situation of playing a game online while transmitting data back and forward.

Adapter 1 is the Killer Nic and Adapter 2 is the motherboard solution. The results above show that the Killer 2100 is 4.0 faster than the motherboard solution and delivers a result with almost 25 times less jitter. On a lesser solution this can actually be as high as 35 times faster with 120 times less jitter!

Our average UDP ping was 0.000287643 on the Killer 2100 and it was 0.003075006 on the onboard solution. Our average mean ping was 0.232525 on the Killer 2100 and 0.921490 on the onboard solution. The worst case scenario is more critical as it could cause lag online. The onboard solution is 5.287735 while it is 0.355063 on the Killer 2100 … massive differences. Bear in mind this is obviously over a very tight local network, but when heading online to game on a server thousands of miles away this will increase, exponentially.

Netperf is a suite that is designed to test network performance across a wide variety of parameters. This is generally a throughput test which will measure ultimate data flow between the hardware points. You can learn more about Netperf over here.

We set up a run via test-tcp.bat to the server IP address in our network with packet sizes of around 1460 bytes across a set period of time. The server system also used a Killer 2100 NIC for this test.

Our onboard card achieved rates between 750 and 800mbit per second. Next we switch to the Killer card.

We managed to achieve between 920-950mbit per second with the Killer 2100.

Next we want to test UDP throughput and this requires the use of the Test-UDP.bat file we send 1472 byte packet data to the server machine. We set a time of 20 seconds again and run the test multiple times to get an average.

It is quite clear that the Killer 2100 is delivering considerably more bandwidth both with TCP and UDP Data Transfer.

Synthetic testing is a great way to measure cold hard facts, but its important we translate this into a real world environment so we can see any possible benefits from switching to a Killer 2100 Network card.

First we created a 2.7 GB folder of various files. Jpegs, database files and system files. Then we copied it across from machine to machine with a combination of the Intel and Killer 2100 Network cards in both machines.

Onboard to onboard gives us a solid reference figure of around 25 seconds. When we change one over to a single Killer Nic we can shave 0.8 seconds off the time, and finally with two Killer Nic′s sending and receiving we reduce the time to just over 23 seconds.

Testing online gaming is a very difficult thing – we have already shown that with Resident Evil and online activity that the situation is improved dramatically.

We fired up Call Of Duty, Bad Company 2 and several Valve games and fragged away for a few hours. We noticed that once we got used to the Killer 2100 we never noticed lags or stuttering, but when we switched back to the onboard solution that sometimes we would get drop out which was noticeable. This is obviously dependent on the server we connect to, but with the Killer 2100 it seemed to deal with worse conditions much better. It is something you adapt to, and you never know what you are missing, but with both NIC’s connected to our gigabit switch, we would play for 30 minutes, drop out, switch over and try with the other. It really started to become noticeable, especially when I monitored CPU usage, even on such high powered machines.

CPU performance would drop by up to 5% when using the Killer 2100. The gains with a lesser processor would be more noticeable.

Colin McRae: Dirt 2 (known as Dirt 2 outside Europe and stylised, DiRT) is a racing game released in September 2009, and is the sequel to Colin McRae: Dirt. This is the first game in the McRae series since McRae’s death in 2007. It was announced on 19 November 2008 and features Ken Block, Travis Pastrana, Tanner Foust, and Dave Mirra. The game includes many new race-events, including stadium events. Along with the player, an RV travels from one event to another, and serves as ‘headquarters’ for the player. It features a roster of contemporary off-road events, taking players to diverse and challenging real-world environments. The game takes place across four continents: Asia, Europe, Africa and North America. The game includes five different event types. Rally, Rallycross, ‘Trailblazer,’ ‘Land Rush’ and ‘Raid.’ The World Tour mode sees players competing in multi-car and solo races at new locations, and also includes a new multiplayer mode.

This engine support DX11 and was one of the integral releases for ATI when they launched the 5xxx series cards. Hardware tessellation is used on the crowd, as well as water and cloth objects. DirectCompute 11 accelerated high definition ambient occulsion is also integrated with full floating point high dynamic range lighting.

We enabled very high settings, including hardware tessellated animated crowds and dynamic water.

A great result for the VisionTek Killer HD 5770 Combo card, keeping the game playable at all time, even with 4AA at our choosen settings.

Aliens V Predator has proved to be a big seller since the release and Sega have taken the franchise into new territory after taking it from Sierra. AVP is a Direct X 11 supported title and delivers not only advanced shadow rendering but high quality tessellation for the cards on test today.

We enabled med/high settings, Tessellation + Adv, Shadows off. AA and AF were disabled.

At these tuned settings, the engine remains playable throughout with only a few dips close to the stutter zone. A very good result considering the high DX11 demands.

Battlefield Bad Company 2 brings the spectacular Battlefield gameplay to the forefront of next-gen consoles and PC, featuring best-in-class vehicular combat set across a wide range of huge sandbox maps each with a different tactical focus. New vehicles like the All Terrain Vehicle (ATV) and the UH-60 transport helicopter allow for all-new multiplayer tactics in the warzone. Extensive fine-tuning ensures that this will be the most realistic vehicle combat experience to date. Tactical destruction is taken to new heights with the updated DICE Frostbite engine. Players can now take down entire buildings or create their own vantage points by blasting holes through cover, thereby delivering a unique dynamic experience in every match.

We set the resolution to 1080p and disabled AA and AF, but set all image quality options to the highest.

After some fine tuning we were able to get the engine performing well at 1080p with only a few heavy firefights causing the frame rate to drop just below 25 fps. Generally however, this is perfectly playable.

Just Cause 2 employs the Avalanche Engine 2.0; an updated version of the engine used in Just Cause. The game is set on the other side of the world from the original Just Cause, on the fictional island of Panau in Southeast Asia. Panau has varied terrain, from desert to alpine to rainforest. Rico Rodriguez returns as the protagonist, aiming to overthrow the evil dictator Pandak “Baby” Panay and confront his former mentor, Tom Sheldon.

We set the graphic options to their highest settings with SSAO on high. Anti aliasing was disabled however we toggled on x16 anisotrophic filtering.

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At these settings the game remains playable throughout, enabling AA proves too much and the engine performance drops dramatically.

Crysis Warhead, like the original, Crysis, is based in a future where an ancient alien spacecraft has been discovered beneath the Earth on an island east of the Philippines. The single-player campaign has the player assume the role of (Former SAS) Delta Force operator Sergeant Michael Sykes, referred to in-game by his call sign, Psycho. Psycho’s arsenal of futuristic weapons builds on those showcased in Crysis, with the introduction of Mini-SMGs which can be dual-wielded, a six-shot grenade launcher equipped with EMP grenades, and the destructive, short ranged Plasma Accumulator Cannon (PAX). The highly versatile Nanosuit returns.

In Crysis Warhead, the player fights North Korean and extraterrestrial enemies, in many different locations, such as a tropical island jungle, inside an “Ice Sphere”, an underground mining complex, which is followed by a convoy train transporting an unknown alien object held by the North Koreans, and finally, to an airfield. Like Crysis, Warhead uses Microsoft’s Direct3D 10 (DirectX 10) for graphics rendering.

We use a particularly intensive area of gameplay which we call the Cargo run, this is strictly a ‘worst case scenario’ and generally you should experience slightly better performance through the majority of the game. We set the predefined settings to ‘mainstream'.

Although the image quality is far from maximum at our mainstream settings, the game is playable and the engine runs smooth throughout. We all know how demanding this game is, so if you want to run at Gamer or Enthusiast settings, then more powerful hardware is going to be needed.

Far Cry 2 (commonly abbreviated as “FC2 or “fc2″) is an open-ended first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It was released on October 21, 2008 in North America and on October 23, 2008 in Europe and Australia. It was made available on Steam on October 22, 2008. Crytek, the developers of the original game, were not involved in the development of Far Cry 2.

Ubisoft has marketed Far Cry 2 as the true sequel to Far Cry, though the sequel has very few noticeable similarities to the original game. Instead, it features completely new characters and setting, as well as a new style of gameplay that allows the player greater freedom to explore different African landscapes such as deserts, jungles, and savannas. The game takes place in a modern-day East African nation in a state of anarchy and civil war. The player takes control of a mercenary on a lengthy journey to locate and assassinate “The Jackal,” a notorious arms dealer.

For our testing we are using Direct X 10 rendering mode, with all in game details set to “Ultra High”. HDR is enabled.

We played around with the settings, and 2AA was also playable, however the frame rate did drop to around 25fps, which is a little close to the stutter zone. At these settings, the game was perfectly playable and looked great.

Metro 2033 is an action-oriented video game with a combination of survival horror, and first-person shooter elements. The game is based on the novel Metro 2033 by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. It was developed by 4A Games in Ukraine and released in March 2010 for the Xbox 360 and Microsoft Windows.

There is some contention regarding whether the engine is based on the pre-release X-Ray engine (as claimed by Sergiy Grygorovych, the founder of GSC Game World, as well as users who have seen the 4A Engine SDK screenshots, citing visual similarities, shared resources, and technical evaluation of the pre-release 4A Engine demo conducted at the request of GSC Game World), or whether the engine is an original development (as claimed by 4A Games and Oles’ Shiskovtsov in particular, who claims it would have been impractical to retrofit the X-ray engine with console support). 4A Engine features Nvidia PhysX support, enhanced AI, and a console SDK for Xbox 360. The PC version includes exclusive features such as DirectX 11 support and has been described as “a love letter to PC gamers” because of the developers’ choice “to make the PC version [especially] phenomenal”.

We tested with settings on medium,  Tessellation is disabled. AA and AF are also disabled.

Reducing the image quality and disabling Tessellation helps the HD5770 to churn out playable frame rates at this resolution. The image quality isn't bad, but this is one of the more demanding games right now on the market.

Room ambience in our labs is kept to 23c with air conditioning to ensure accurate results.

To stress test we run Crysis at Mainstream settings and then use Furmark. Furmark is a synthetic test and not really indicative of ‘real world’ conditions but it is interesting nonetheless.

The temperatures are fantastic, with the card idling under 40c and peaking at 51c when gaming.

Return to ambient is a feature we have recently added to our reviews … we measure the time it takes for a solution to return to idle temperatures, immediately after full load. The faster the time, the better the cooler – for example a Noctua NH D14 cooler will return an Intel processor to idle temperatures much faster than a reference cooler. This is a good indication of how quickly a heatsink can dissipate heat.

17 seconds for the cooler to return the core to idle temperatures, after 30 minutes of running Furmark under stress testing, great results. When gaming this would be faster, as the load temperature is 7c less.

Recently we have changed our method of measuring noise levels. We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. We are using a heatpipe based passive power supply and an Intel SSD to keep noise levels to a minimum. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests. Ambient noise in the room is around 20-25dBa. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation.

Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

The card can be classed as one of the quieter HD 5770's that we have tested to date, peaking at around 34 dBa when under Furmark load (and the fan at 58%). Generally when gaming the solution is emitting around 32dBa of noise.

To test power consumption today we are using a Keithley Integra unit and we measure power consumption from the VGA card inputs, not the system wide drain. The best way to get maximum load results is by using Furmark, and even though it is not indicative of a real world situation it shows the limits the card can theoretically demand. The ‘gaming’ results are measured when playing Crysis Warhead and is a more valuable result to take from this.

These results are very good, around 8W less than the original reference cards, but several watts more than the single slot solutions from other manufacturers, such as XFX or PowerColor.

To overclock we used the latest beta version of Sapphire's TriXX software tool, our favourite software for overclocking AMD graphics cards.

An extra 60mhz was available on the core before artificating. The GDDR5 memory could be pushed to a maximum of 1270mhz (5080mhz effective) before the system would hardlock.

KitGuru has been a huge supporter of the HD5770 in the past with many solutions walking away with our top awards. As a budget gamer offering it was hard to beat, especially as you can pick up the hardware now for £95 inc vat.

While the AMD HD5770 is due for a refresh over the coming months, it still proves to be a capable, cost effective gaming card for the budget aware audience who are happy sacrificing a little image quality at times. With the less intensive engines, it is perfectly capable of delivering solid frame rates at 1080p.

This Visiontek Killer HD 5770 is an unusual hybrid card which on paper doesn't perhaps make a lot of sense. In the real world however, the combination works great. We have already been singing the praises of the Killer 2100 networking card and have given away a handful of them to our community. It isn't just our staff who like the NIC, the people who won the hardware also seem to be impressed as you can read here and here. As a networking solution it is easily a class leader for gamers who want the maximum performance.

As a gaming card the Visiontek Killer HD 5770 delivers great temperatures (51c), excellent power drain (68w) and low noise levels (32 dBa). Technically there is nothing we can find to fault … as far as HD5770's go its pretty much as good as it gets.

As we mentioned earlier in the review, this card isn't available in the United Kingdom, but looking online we can see that it seems to be retailing for around $195 in the USA. A standard Visiontek HD5770 costs around $150, a Killer 2100 costs $85. Therefore you save $40 and get the added benefit of an all in one solution, saving space and creating a tidier system build.

KitGuru says: A HD5770 is still a capable solution for 1080p gaming, especially if you aren't that bothered about running with high levels of Anti Aliasing. This Visiontek card adds a class leading gaming NIC into the mix.

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