For those of you that might have forgotten, Bigfoot networks was absorbed my Qualcomm Atheros some time back and the new company has been busy working on some new Killer NIC products. The company has now unveiled its latest addition, the Killer Wireless-N 1202 which seems to be a replacement for the older 1102 model.

As with the 1102, the 1202 sports 2×2 MIMO support at speeds of up to 300Mbps on the 2.4 and 5GHz bands and its still comes as a half-size mini PCI Express card. The only new addition that we can spot is support for Bluetooth 4.0 + HS and were actually not entirely sure why a gamer would want this integrated in their wireless network card. Even more so as when Bluetooth is enabled, the Wi-Fi will drop down in speed to 150Mbps, as one of the antennas is shared with the Bluetooth part of the chip.

By chance we happened to spot a very similar product over at Qualcomm Atheros the other day, namely the XSPAN AR9462, which as far as we can tell is identical in terms of functionality. Even the block diagram is identical bar some colour changes and this suggests that the new Killer Wireless-N 1202 is in fact using the XSPAN AR9462 chipset with some fancy software added to it. Considering that Atheros has generally been thought of as a budget brand when it comes to notebook Wi-Fi solutions, this looks like a good way for Qualcomm Atheros to make some extra cash out of the same hardware by bundling it with some fancy software.

No word on pricing or availability and for that matter it appears as if the 1202 has at least for the time being, have been removed from the Killer website. In related news, Qualcomm Atheros also came clean on the Killer E2200, the same network chip as the one found on Gigabytes G1.Sniper 3 motherboard and Sapphires recently launched Pure Platinum Z77K.

Source: The Verge


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