That is an incredible amount of data entry considering the sheer number of boards on the platform (over 50 IIRC). Between Newegg and the board partner's websites, who both offer 'compare' functionality, should show at least some of what you are looking for.
I use the Bench all the time to compare GPUs, especially to get an idea of how high end cards from 3-4 generations ago stack up against newer mid-range cards. If you guys can build a comprehensive tool to narrow down motherboards based on features it would be great. Currently my go-to sites are Newegg and PCPartPicker but having another tool to compliment those would be awesome.
Fair enough. What about a cut down version of just its main competitors? Would that be a small enough list, or is the price point that crowded? You spend a good bit talking about picking a board based on features without making a recommendation so I think a comparo table would be helpful.
Yeah it is stupid indeed, you pay extra for something you never asked for. Fortunately you should be able to completely switch all LEDs off if desired.
Fucking killer NIC. That shit cannot die soon enough. Why even waste space on that, even 10GbE and an intel 1GbE would make more sense.
I was looking at Gigabyte boards a bit ago and anything with decent features was ruined by KillerShit, so I switched to ASUS for PRO/A series without dumb shit thrown in.
Hey Ian, since Joe has the hardware already, is it possible for Anandtech to do some more in-depth benchmarking of the Killer ethernet and wireless cards on this motherboard? Internet gaming tests under real world conditions might help us put Killer's value proposition into perspective.
I agree with peachncream. Killer has made some absolutely awful networking products in the past that were further crippled by their horrendous drivers and unnecessary software. It has left a bad taste in everybody's mouth and very few if any PC enthusiasts are happy to see their products in a motherboard. From what I see online, it seems as though most people either don't install their software or uninstall it if it comes pre-packaged. Rather than forwarding complaints to deaf ears at Rivet Networks, it would make a lot more sense to do some very detailed benchmarking, including Aquantia's new chipsets, showing the pros and cons of each solution and the impact they have on things like latency, CPU usage, bandwidth, and game perfomance. I am especially interested to see some benchmarks pitting the new Aquantia chipsets against Intel's 10gbe offerings like the X540, X550, and X710 with RJ45 ports.
There is nothing wrong with their hardware in my opinion.
Just install the basic driver, or the Qualcomm driver, and you will be unable to tell the difference from your typical Intel NIC, on any consumer device. You don't have to install their network suite.
Meanwhile I've had no end of trouble with my X540 10Gb/s NICs. So much so - I returned it for replacement. And whilst I've not been home yet to try the replacement, I'm not confident of good results.
Hello Ian from Australia! I signed up just now to reply to your question to timecop1818 and I'll give you my impression of previous killer standalone $200 network cards and their embedded chipset Ethernet products. Basically the product is of no real benefit over any other networking product and in one specific case I'll mention later on completely useless. It supposedly originally prioritized gaming packets within the machine over other traffic which might have been of some use at a lan event where you bring your own machine but then you probably wouldn't be using your machine for anything else at the time so gaming traffic was probably all that was going out over the network anyway, so no benefit there and these days most people do their gaming over the internet anyway.
When I only had 8/1 Adsl1 and (max speed) 12/1 Adsl2 available for internet the same would apply as you couldn't do anything else because even if you downloaded other stuff at say 50% of Adsl download speed the 50 byte acknowledgement packets going out to request the next packet be sent down to you would blow out pings from 40-60 to 200 as the upload speed of 1 Mbit was just way too slow and congestion occurred (think goat track compared to 8 lane freeway) so again I'm left with just gaming traffic only because I couldn't do anything else so no benefit over any other ethernet chipset again.
Now that I'm on fibre at 100/40 and I have a truckload of bandwidth I can be gaming and also downloading Nvidia drivers at 11 MB's and gaming pings only slightly rise from 22 to 26 so killer is not needed at all again as any other Ethernet chipset will do just fine.
Software: According to their website https://www.killernetworking.com/driver-downloads it's windows only and nothing else. I have a 4930K and a Gigabyte X79S-UP5-WIFI board which has both Intel and Realtek ethernet connectors on it and that's my Windows 7 gaming machine. My other identical board has an I7-3820 cpu and I'm testing Solaris 11.3 as a ZFS NAS and for whatever reason the Intel Ethernet connector came up as "mis-configured" and I couldn't work out why that was so I plugged in the network cable into the other Realtek connector and off I went. If I had a killer ethernet instead of Realtek I'd either have to figure out the Intel mis-configuration or get another Gbe network card (probably Intel) and plug it in as Killer have no Solaris, BSD or Linux drivers which is pretty useless of them.
For those people who find that Gbe isn't fast enough and are looking at 10Gbe that's not expensive the speed increase stated on their webpage https://www.killernetworking.com/products/killer-e... going from 940 Mbs to 1102 Mbs may as well be totally insignificant as all it is is just re-inventing the existing wheel. I picked up about a year ago very cheap (approx USD$ 50) Mellanox QDR infiniband cards when they deprecated the technology and these cards are 40 Gbs Infiniband/10 Gbs Ethernet capable so if this chipset actually was 100 Base T (or even 50 or 25) then and only then would I possibly be interested as probably would other people as well.
No one wants to muck around with a "control center" for Ethernet as I just want the network to "just work" when I plug the cable in and I'm happy with some crappy no-name no-brand software TCP/IP stack that works reliably even if it only goes at say 90% of maximum speed. I hope its not anywhere near as useless as the Nvidia Firewall software I once had the misfortune to install as it completely stuffed up my network port and rendered it non-functional which still didn't work even after I uninstalled the software and I had to reformat the hard drive and re-install windows to fix that problem.
Anyway that's everything that's CURRENTLY wrong with this product and nothing that's right with it as I have explained in detail above, If they posted drivers for all the other OS's then it might get half way to being merely usable. Feel free to pass my entire comment over to Rivet and I look forward to any reply to any part of my comments posted back here but I'm not holding my breath in anticipation of that.
They are the answer to a non existant problem... or better the real problem is the Internet speeds people have and there's nothing Killer can do about it. People that have slow internet already turn off any sharing software when they play games and those that have a fast one don't care cause they have more than enough, those in-between will just turn off any bandwidth hungry apps just for a piece of mind. On bittorrent if you share at a very slow speeds, as would be the case if you play and torrent at the same time on a slow connection no one will connect to you or kick you if the speeds are too low, no one wants to spend time and resources on a connection that is as fast as a snail.
Or LEDs at the back of the Monitor, changing colors according to the picture displayed. Oh wait, that already exists and is heavily copyrighted, so that only one manufacturer can use it and doesnt want it to take foot in gaming.
Just say no to X299's VROC scam. Intel has made a mess of its support for M.2 NVMe RAID-0 arrays, and boards built on this chipset are a hot mess. Even with the "proper" VROC key (assuming you can get one), you'll find that Intel LIED about supporting non-Intel NVMe storage for bootable RAID arrays.
It pains me to say that... I've been an Intel fan for many, many years and was looking forward to seeing their RAID solution optimized for NVMe, but motherboard manufaturers rushed out motherboards last year that linked M.2 slots to DMI PCI-e lanes (chipset, not direct to CPU), and hampered the whole implementation with crappy BIOS software. The Asus Hyper-X M.2 card, that works well with non-Asus AMD-based motherboards fails to work on these Gigabyte motherboards, too...
Maybe you all don't care about getting 20GB/sec throughput on your bootable storage, but if Intel is mucking up and outright lying about this, how confident can you be about the rest of their features?
I don't know exactly how GIGABYTE releases motherboards, because it seems that they keep every model for a very short time in production. While I can't find the X299 Designare EX or the Aorus Gaming 7 Pro anywhere in stock, I have found the GIGABYTE X299 Aorus Gaming 9 for sale on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/173287187006 - and the price seems to be pretty good.
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29 Comments
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tech6 - Friday, January 26, 2018 - link
Welcome to another episode of Pimp my Mobo.I'm sure its a great board but that LED craze cannot end soon enough.
Manch - Friday, January 26, 2018 - link
Yeah, don't care for the RGB crap. I have an corsair keyboard that lights up red for when its dark. That's it.The board feature list is nice but id like to see a compare to the rest of the line up and its competitors.
Can yall add that Joe?
Joe Shields - Friday, January 26, 2018 - link
That is an incredible amount of data entry considering the sheer number of boards on the platform (over 50 IIRC). Between Newegg and the board partner's websites, who both offer 'compare' functionality, should show at least some of what you are looking for.Ian Cutress - Friday, January 26, 2018 - link
It gives me an idea for a project.WithoutWeakness - Tuesday, January 30, 2018 - link
I use the Bench all the time to compare GPUs, especially to get an idea of how high end cards from 3-4 generations ago stack up against newer mid-range cards. If you guys can build a comprehensive tool to narrow down motherboards based on features it would be great. Currently my go-to sites are Newegg and PCPartPicker but having another tool to compliment those would be awesome.Manch - Monday, January 29, 2018 - link
Fair enough. What about a cut down version of just its main competitors? Would that be a small enough list, or is the price point that crowded? You spend a good bit talking about picking a board based on features without making a recommendation so I think a comparo table would be helpful.justaviking - Friday, January 26, 2018 - link
Soon we will need a second power supply in our systems... one we can dedicate to all the LEDs that dazzle us.Beaver M. - Sunday, January 28, 2018 - link
Not to mention extra cooling, because that many LEDs also produce quite some heat.milkod2001 - Friday, January 26, 2018 - link
Yeah it is stupid indeed, you pay extra for something you never asked for. Fortunately you should be able to completely switch all LEDs off if desired.Cygni - Friday, January 26, 2018 - link
I, too, get mad about things that add next to no price to motherboards that I can just turn off and ignore.Lord of the Bored - Saturday, January 27, 2018 - link
You misunderstand. It isn't about whether it inconveniences or affects them in any way. It is about needing a reason to bitch about something.WinterCharm - Thursday, February 1, 2018 - link
> adds next to no priceCitation needed.
timecop1818 - Friday, January 26, 2018 - link
Fucking killer NIC. That shit cannot die soon enough. Why even waste space on that, even 10GbE and an intel 1GbE would make more sense.I was looking at Gigabyte boards a bit ago and anything with decent features was ruined by KillerShit, so I switched to ASUS for PRO/A series without dumb shit thrown in.
Ian Cutress - Friday, January 26, 2018 - link
I'll forward your concerns to Rivet. Anything specific you don't like about Killer, especially the latest hardware?PeachNCream - Friday, January 26, 2018 - link
Hey Ian, since Joe has the hardware already, is it possible for Anandtech to do some more in-depth benchmarking of the Killer ethernet and wireless cards on this motherboard? Internet gaming tests under real world conditions might help us put Killer's value proposition into perspective.oRAirwolf - Friday, January 26, 2018 - link
I agree with peachncream. Killer has made some absolutely awful networking products in the past that were further crippled by their horrendous drivers and unnecessary software. It has left a bad taste in everybody's mouth and very few if any PC enthusiasts are happy to see their products in a motherboard. From what I see online, it seems as though most people either don't install their software or uninstall it if it comes pre-packaged. Rather than forwarding complaints to deaf ears at Rivet Networks, it would make a lot more sense to do some very detailed benchmarking, including Aquantia's new chipsets, showing the pros and cons of each solution and the impact they have on things like latency, CPU usage, bandwidth, and game perfomance. I am especially interested to see some benchmarks pitting the new Aquantia chipsets against Intel's 10gbe offerings like the X540, X550, and X710 with RJ45 ports.Notmyusualid - Saturday, January 27, 2018 - link
I disagree.There is nothing wrong with their hardware in my opinion.
Just install the basic driver, or the Qualcomm driver, and you will be unable to tell the difference from your typical Intel NIC, on any consumer device. You don't have to install their network suite.
Meanwhile I've had no end of trouble with my X540 10Gb/s NICs. So much so - I returned it for replacement. And whilst I've not been home yet to try the replacement, I'm not confident of good results.
HobartTas - Saturday, January 27, 2018 - link
Hello Ian from Australia! I signed up just now to reply to your question to timecop1818 and I'll give you my impression of previous killer standalone $200 network cards and their embedded chipset Ethernet products. Basically the product is of no real benefit over any other networking product and in one specific case I'll mention later on completely useless. It supposedly originally prioritized gaming packets within the machine over other traffic which might have been of some use at a lan event where you bring your own machine but then you probably wouldn't be using your machine for anything else at the time so gaming traffic was probably all that was going out over the network anyway, so no benefit there and these days most people do their gaming over the internet anyway.When I only had 8/1 Adsl1 and (max speed) 12/1 Adsl2 available for internet the same would apply as you couldn't do anything else because even if you downloaded other stuff at say 50% of Adsl download speed the 50 byte acknowledgement packets going out to request the next packet be sent down to you would blow out pings from 40-60 to 200 as the upload speed of 1 Mbit was just way too slow and congestion occurred (think goat track compared to 8 lane freeway) so again I'm left with just gaming traffic only because I couldn't do anything else so no benefit over any other ethernet chipset again.
Now that I'm on fibre at 100/40 and I have a truckload of bandwidth I can be gaming and also downloading Nvidia drivers at 11 MB's and gaming pings only slightly rise from 22 to 26 so killer is not needed at all again as any other Ethernet chipset will do just fine.
Software: According to their website https://www.killernetworking.com/driver-downloads it's windows only and nothing else. I have a 4930K and a Gigabyte X79S-UP5-WIFI board which has both Intel and Realtek ethernet connectors on it and that's my Windows 7 gaming machine. My other identical board has an I7-3820 cpu and I'm testing Solaris 11.3 as a ZFS NAS and for whatever reason the Intel Ethernet connector came up as "mis-configured" and I couldn't work out why that was so I plugged in the network cable into the other Realtek connector and off I went. If I had a killer ethernet instead of Realtek I'd either have to figure out the Intel mis-configuration or get another Gbe network card (probably Intel) and plug it in as Killer have no Solaris, BSD or Linux drivers which is pretty useless of them.
For those people who find that Gbe isn't fast enough and are looking at 10Gbe that's not expensive the speed increase stated on their webpage https://www.killernetworking.com/products/killer-e... going from 940 Mbs to 1102 Mbs may as well be totally insignificant as all it is is just re-inventing the existing wheel. I picked up about a year ago very cheap (approx USD$ 50) Mellanox QDR infiniband cards when they deprecated the technology and these cards are 40 Gbs Infiniband/10 Gbs Ethernet capable so if this chipset actually was 100 Base T (or even 50 or 25) then and only then would I possibly be interested as probably would other people as well.
No one wants to muck around with a "control center" for Ethernet as I just want the network to "just work" when I plug the cable in and I'm happy with some crappy no-name no-brand software TCP/IP stack that works reliably even if it only goes at say 90% of maximum speed. I hope its not anywhere near as useless as the Nvidia Firewall software I once had the misfortune to install as it completely stuffed up my network port and rendered it non-functional which still didn't work even after I uninstalled the software and I had to reformat the hard drive and re-install windows to fix that problem.
Anyway that's everything that's CURRENTLY wrong with this product and nothing that's right with it as I have explained in detail above, If they posted drivers for all the other OS's then it might get half way to being merely usable. Feel free to pass my entire comment over to Rivet and I look forward to any reply to any part of my comments posted back here but I'm not holding my breath in anticipation of that.
Cheers
Strunf - Saturday, January 27, 2018 - link
They are the answer to a non existant problem... or better the real problem is the Internet speeds people have and there's nothing Killer can do about it. People that have slow internet already turn off any sharing software when they play games and those that have a fast one don't care cause they have more than enough, those in-between will just turn off any bandwidth hungry apps just for a piece of mind.On bittorrent if you share at a very slow speeds, as would be the case if you play and torrent at the same time on a slow connection no one will connect to you or kick you if the speeds are too low, no one wants to spend time and resources on a connection that is as fast as a snail.
Tamz_msc - Friday, January 26, 2018 - link
From what I have read recently Killer LAN is mostly fine as long as you don't install their software. Linux support might be spotty though.dave_the_nerd - Friday, January 26, 2018 - link
What the actual hell?The worst thing about my hobbies are, apparently, the other people who enjoy them.
Lord of the Bored - Saturday, January 27, 2018 - link
Yup, that about sums it up.cbm80 - Friday, January 26, 2018 - link
Disco Stu will overclock you!FreckledTrout - Sunday, January 28, 2018 - link
Why don't we don't see RGB used for actual useful features like color coding with light the back ports like the audio ports etc?Beaver M. - Sunday, January 28, 2018 - link
Or LEDs at the back of the Monitor, changing colors according to the picture displayed.Oh wait, that already exists and is heavily copyrighted, so that only one manufacturer can use it and doesnt want it to take foot in gaming.
Gunbuster - Monday, January 29, 2018 - link
Or even bother to sell a TV in the united states. Thanks Philips...Gunbuster - Sunday, January 28, 2018 - link
Aorus bro eagle is still not animated in LED lifting a dumbell...BenJeremy - Monday, January 29, 2018 - link
Just say no to X299's VROC scam. Intel has made a mess of its support for M.2 NVMe RAID-0 arrays, and boards built on this chipset are a hot mess. Even with the "proper" VROC key (assuming you can get one), you'll find that Intel LIED about supporting non-Intel NVMe storage for bootable RAID arrays.It pains me to say that... I've been an Intel fan for many, many years and was looking forward to seeing their RAID solution optimized for NVMe, but motherboard manufaturers rushed out motherboards last year that linked M.2 slots to DMI PCI-e lanes (chipset, not direct to CPU), and hampered the whole implementation with crappy BIOS software. The Asus Hyper-X M.2 card, that works well with non-Asus AMD-based motherboards fails to work on these Gigabyte motherboards, too...
Maybe you all don't care about getting 20GB/sec throughput on your bootable storage, but if Intel is mucking up and outright lying about this, how confident can you be about the rest of their features?
wolfman3k5 - Thursday, April 26, 2018 - link
I don't know exactly how GIGABYTE releases motherboards, because it seems that they keep every model for a very short time in production. While I can't find the X299 Designare EX or the Aorus Gaming 7 Pro anywhere in stock, I have found the GIGABYTE X299 Aorus Gaming 9 for sale on eBay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/173287187006 - and the price seems to be pretty good.