No, this is not the latest attempt by some crackpot hackers to emulate ethernet using a HDMI port, it is a true HD5 series ATI GPU which has been equipped with a network jack.Some may wonder what purpose this will serve, given the ubiquity of ethernet ports built into motherboards, but this particular card has an ace up its sleeve: the network chip is in fact a KillerNIC 2100, which offloads all network calculations from the processor and helps to prioritise game traffic (indeed it is the case that most functions built into motherboards delegate the hard work to the CPU).
The idea is to better exploit the PCI-Express 16x interface if the GPU is incapable of fully using it, without using an additional PCI-e 1x slot for the KillerNIC board.
What purpose does this serve to the average folder? None! But it could be useful to those of you that game too.
Source : BigFoot, techPowerUp!
jmn
On: 06/05/10
