This is just a short one - my brief rant about the early abandonment of a promising network card.

I bought a KillerNIC M1 at the end of 2008 in order to reduce ping time in online games. I have tended to stay well back from the top of the line where the general purpose CPU is concerned in systems I build for myself, so I had high expectations about the benefit I would see from this card offloading additional work.

I was pleased with the overall performance of this card on my 64-bit Vista system once I upgraded to the latest beta drivers at the time (4.1.0.36).

But here is the problem - those beta drivers were the last drivers they ever ‘released’ for this card - and you can only get those by digging around on the beta forum. Windows 7 is on the horizon and there is no word on any support for these cards other than reports of BSODs from early adopters.

I am having flashbacks to my driver experience with ATI video cards back in the day (around 2000) when it took them forever to get new drivers out for newer platforms.

So here is my message to you Bigfoot - I NEVER buy ATI cards. I don’t care what their benchmarks or feature checklists show. NVIDIA always gets my business because of the terrible support I received from ATI almost a decade ago and because of the awesome driver support NVIDIA has always provided.

Someday maybe - if NVIDIA drops the ball - I may take another look at an ATI card.

Right now Bigfoot is in the doghouse - you guys can forget about any more business from me and I will recommend against your products every chance I get.