EVGA Killer Xeno Pro Nic Card- My Short Review

Hi all,

I've never put too much stock into the Killer M1 or K1 Nic cards.  They've been pretty slammed by bad reviews and given their price, they seemed to be totally unnecessary, even for someone like me, who is a big MMO fan.  However, when EVGA came out with its own Killer Xeno Pro card, I couldn't resist (I'm a big EVGA fan) even though I doubted that the performance difference would be worth $130 and a PCI-E slot.

Anyway, installing the card took about 10 minutes.  It is basically plug and play.  All I had to do was open the case, shove the card inside, close the case, disable the motherboard ethernet cards in the BIOS and install the drivers for the card off the CD (which are the same as the website drivers).  In short- installation was flawless. 

After installing, I immediately opening up World of Warcraft to see the results.  Normally, my ping is around 150-200.  I opened WoW and my ping was over 200!!  Pretty disappointed, I tried playing for a bit and also noticed that the game's responsiveness was slower as well and outside of the game, webpages were taking longer to respond to requests.  After reading some of the EVGA forums, I went into the card's settings and turned off the bandwidth monitor and changed some of the other core settings.

Now, I opened up WoW again and my ping was.... between 19 and 25, consistently (in Raids, Dalaran, IF etc)!! Responsiveness was WAY up and the game ran noticeably smoother.  I've never had my ping below 100 in crowded areas of WoW until I got this card- it was amazing.  Additionally, webpages seemed to be more responsible than normal to requests!  I also tried playing COD4 online and it too, seemed a lot better!

So- is the card worth $130, well I guess that depends on the person.  If you play a lot of MMOs and your ping is over 150 normally, I would say definitely. If you already have a low ping, but have a lot of extra cash to burn, I would recommend giving it a try.  If you are choosing between this card and a sound card, I would probably recommend getting the sound card first, unless you have a lot of annoying lag issues.