Bigfoot recently unveiled its new series of Killer Wireless-N adapters for notebooks. We sat down with Vice President of Marketing John Drewry to find out what this product means for portable gaming.

If you're a PC gamer who enjoys the mobility of a laptop, then you might want to keep an eye on Bigfoot Networks. This company has been developing products to help reduce network latency in desktop PCs for years, but it branched out to notebooks this month with the launch of its new series of Killer Wireless-N adapters.

“Gaming has changed over the years. So has Bigfoot,” said John Drewry, vice president of marketing. “Notebooks now have a demand for gaming. This whole performance segment of notebooks has blossomed and continues to be a growing segment of the market.”

So why should you care about a new line of wireless network cards? Aside from providing you with the flexibility of portable online gaming, the Wireless-N adapters are fast. The Killer Wireless-N 1103 and 1102 enable data rates of up to 450 Mbps and 300 Mbps, respectively. Drewry boasted that Bigfoot's cards feature up to five times better latency than the competition, which provides a noticeable improvement in lag, video quality and voice chat.

To prove his claim, Drewry gave us the tested scenario of streaming a “Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World” HD trailer on YouTube while downloading a torrent file at the same time. During the test, the trailer streamed without any pauses on the machines using Bigfoot's Wireless-N adapters. However, notebooks equipped with competing network cards froze upwards of 14 times while attempting to play the video.

Drewry also used the YouTube example to make another point: gamers do more than just play games on their notebooks. “They're looking things up, watching videos and playing games,” he said. “The types of apps that traditional networking gear was designed for has evolved and changed. In many cases, it was designed for simple web browsing and file transfers. It's only been in the last 10 years or so that we've seen things like online gaming, growth in communication applications and explosions in online video streaming. Focusing in on latency, bandwidth control and similar solutions really provides the greatest benefits to this newest class of applications.”

Bigfoot's wireless adapters come with software that helps players manage their bandwidth and monitor their PC performance. “Our objective is to make things more visible and give users more control,” Drewry said.

Advanced Stream Detect automatically prioritizes application traffic, such as placing Skype above your browser traffic to give you the best call quality possible. Visual Bandwidth Control lets you manually set the maximum level of bandwidth usage for specific applications to free up your laptop for multiple uses. PC Monitor logs wireless performance information on your notebook. "If you're raiding, you can look back at your PC and see what's wrong if something happens,” Drewry said.

The Killer Wireless-N 1102 adapter is currently available in notebooks through a variety of retailers, such as AVADirect, CYBERPOWER, iBUYPOWER, Maingear, ORIGIN PC, Sager, The V-Machine and Velocity Micro. The Killer Wireless-N 1103 adapter will be available soon.

Darryl Gangloff, Editor-in-Chief