I expected more out of anandtech, the whole idea is flawed and they even state it. Once the packet leave you last locally controlled network point, it's completely at the mercy of your provider, their provider, their backbone uplink, router conditions and if anywhere in the could they are doing traffic shaping or have a cruddy ATM (no, not the cash machine) link and many, many other conditions. If the NIC is making any difference, it's because you're either sending too much network traffic and the card driver is set to offload TCP/IP (which makes the NIC do it) or you have some PCI bottleneck that's choking out the card.
Fix what you can on your end (video card, ram, disk drives, cpu, cooling system - yes, cooler running systems perform better) and you'll be much happier.
Yeah, it is mega bling-bling, more if it ran Linux and could make you toast or better yet install it in your toaster so it makes your toast even faster and then your toaster would be running Linux.... :thumbup: *drool*
You can also get a 5 to 10ms better response time by drinking lots of red bull...... think Tweak from south park.......
File this one under snakeoil and the cure for baldness..... still waiting on that last one though.. ;(