Let’s take a closer look at the card.




The card, although not as well-finished some of the early models, has some nice touches such as the ‘K’ logo seen above next to the port. The quality is also very high throughout, there’s nothing flimsy about it.




Beneath the cover, you’ll see the 400MHz Network Processing Unit (NPU) which shows the familiar ‘K’ logo. You can also see that this is quite a small card, so space considerations in most chassis shouldn’t be an issue, though Bigfoot Networks have made the decision to make a full-height card as opposed to a low profile compatible one, which may prevent some people from installing the Killer 2100 into their cases. However, it must be considered that the vast majority of people buying a gaming network card will have a high performance GPU, which are almost exclusively full-height. There are situations when purchasing this card may be useful, even if you don’t game, but that will be covered later.
Note the similarities (and more, importantly, differences) to the Killer Xeno Pro pictured below.




The 2100 clearly uses the same PCB design as the Xeno Pro, but it does not share all components. As mentioned in the introduction, the 2100 is streamlined (read – has features removed), but also sports higher quality components and improved network performance, according to Bigfoot Networks.




There is no cooling solution on the NPU pictured above, and the vented shroud is enough to keep the card barely warm whilst in use. That said, I wouldn’t put it somewhere with no airflow at all, but that is generally not recommended for any PC components.




Here you can see the two Samsung memory chips that make up the 128 MB of onboard RAM. Now this memory doesn’t really have much of a direct bearing on the network performance, it’s just to allow the card to run its own proprietary operating system. If you think about it, you don’t want to put network packets into memory – it’s an unnecessary step that would increase latency.