The Background
Cheating in online games has become a problem of epidemic proportions spawning a whole industry of anti-cheating A/V like tools. Hardcore gamers are the ones that push the edge in hardware adoption as they are the ones snapping up X800s and NForce 3 boards. For gamers, the two most frustrating things in the world are probably cheaters and hardware problems. Besides the common thread of gaming, it seems that the two spheres of hardware and cheating are separate but it has come to my attention that the two have become inextricably linked.
For me, the story begins a couple months ago when I got an email about our review of MSI's K8N Neo, one of the first NForce 3 250Gb boards to hit the market. The reader was critical of our review specifically noting that we did not test games online . It was sort of a strange criticism - usually the comments are more along the lines of "why was it not tested with benchmark x or compared to board y from manufacturer z?" Rest assured, there is not conspiracy theory and the lack of comparative results are usually time or hardware limitations. But I digress. The wording of the email was very specific - the question was "did you ever test this board for online gaming, maybe with a ATI graphics card and found that it does not work with games with punkbuster?" Further email exchanges revealed that the user was having freezing problems. This sounded suspiciously like a networking issue - the firewall onboard the 250Gb had been introduced not long ago and it would not be a stretch to assume that it was an improperly configured firewall. This was quickly dismissed the user stated that an external NIC was used and the freezing problem still occurred.
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