It's got a giant shiny K on top of it, that's all it takes for some people.

Ohh and its CPU can be used for a few lame and gimped applications...

Seems to me that if you have a onboard NIC that doesn't sit on the PCI bus you are probably better off in the end, because the advantages of this thing might get negated by the PCI overhead created that influences CPU cycles and thus games.

It would be a great hit if sold for $20 or less. I think that is nice price point for a NIC

man TR is sad lately. Everyone ignores key facts about things nowadays.

This thing runs apps directly on the NIC! Which means you could do something interesting like implement some sort of QoS on your computer or something.

Hurray for crippled professional-grade NICs that are market towards a crowd that does not even take advantage of its features. The entire FPS benefits are a placebo effect at best.

what? no wireless option?

Eh? Still no PCIe x1 model?

But it's too expensive
and I think it doesn't make a difference for far away game servers.

The numbers really don't justify the NIC at that price but most reviewers mentioned it "felt" smoother during gameplay.
Probably plenty of gamers would buy it for that reason alone because in high paced FPS gaming..."feel" counts for a lot.

right... the card doesn't do anything apart from a few fps in some games and is hardly consistent in that regard and does relatively nothing for your ping that it makes buying these cards a complete waste of money.

Aren't most competitions for money done on a LAN so latency isn't a huge problem anyways?

Wasn't there an article on steroid abuse among "pro gamers" on TR a couple of weeks ago? For me this "killer NIC" makes just as much sense ...

Nah, mind frags can actually help performance in gaming. Killer NIC just isn't that great.