Realtek takes on Killer with Dragon-nic’s

Motherboard manufacturer ECS appears to place Realtek-Dragon nics on its Z170 motherboards. With the Dragon-nic, Realtek seems to compete directly with Qualcomm’s Killer and Intel network cards. The Dragon should perform well with small udp packets.

That writes Anandtech. The first model Dragon-nic has been given model number 8118AS. The first motherboards with the chipsets in question are the ECS Z170 models under the game brand L33T. It concerns the ATX Z170 Blade and Z170 Claymore.

There are not many details about the Dragon-nics yet. The tech site did receive some information from a technician from ECS, such as that the software can be completely adjusted by the motherboard manufacturer. Realtek is also said to have said that the Dragon’s performance is comparable to Qualcomm’s Killer, with less power consumption.

Anandtech calls the naming a bit awkward, because MSI already uses a dragon as its logo. MSI has tied itself up with Killer on many game products and continues to do so because of what they say is a ‘lucrative deal’ with Killer.