Killer NIC makes a difference in WoW

[-silencer-]

If you've got $200 to light on fire, go ahead and buy it.

Otherwise, its a waste of money.

Nice and constructive to the question. I like Silencer's response... matter of fact Silencer always makes me feel smarter after reading his posts.

Thanks, and your avatar always cracks me up. I even emailed it out to my coworkers when I was out with food poisoning a couple months ago and they got a kick out of it.

As for the Killer M1, almost all current reviews are quite accurate - it does work. The original Killer NIC got off to a bad start because sloppy drivers didn't really do anything for most people to really optimize/prioritize packets being sent.. and some people refuse to believe anything but that original stigma because the original reviews were (correct at the time) awful. The truth behind it is that there are still better upgrade options out there today for your machine than a $230 network card. However, if you already have one hell of a system that can't be upgraded much farther, the M1 is one of the few ways to increase performance. If I had to choose between an SSD and a Killer M1 for WoW, without a doubt the SSD makes a huge improvement. That still doesn't mean that the M1 is a waste of money... any time you can take load off the CPU will benefit all processes being run.

If you've already got an i7 965EE, 12GB of ram, 2x SLI/Crossfire with top-end cards, add-on hardware processing sound card, add-on hardware processing RAID controller, RAID0 Velociraptrs, RAID0 SSDs.. an add-on hardware NIC processor is a logical solution and $230 is a relatively minor cost for the overall price of the machine.

Also, don't forget the extra development being put into the Killer M1's feature as a firewall/gateway. There are now a couple apps, and a few in development, that run completely only the Killer's processor - namely a firewall to isolate the network from your mainboard. That's quite useful for security while also not costing you performance - a hardware firewall right there on your machine. This is why the Killer M1 has a USB port on the back of the card. It's not a USB hub, it's a place to hook up a flash/external drive to load the M1-isolated apps.