http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTIzOSwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

"The Killer NIC does exactly what it is advertised to do. It will lower your pings and very likely give you marginally better framerates in real world gaming scenarios. The Killer NIC is not for everyone as it is extremely expensive in this day and age of "free" onboard NICs. There are very likely other upgrades you can make to your computer for the same investment that will give you more in return. Some gamers will see a benefit while others do not. Hardcore deathmatchers are likely to feel the Killer NIC advantages while the middle-of-the road player will not be fine tuned enough to benefit from the experience. Certainly though, the hardcore online gamer is exactly who this product is targeted at."

some /. comments are full of interesting details, such as

http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=210902&cid=17179080

But my NIC already gives me sub-millisecond latency... we're talking a difference of less than 1/1000th of a second, here. How much good would that do outside a LAN party?
Also...better framerates? Again, we're talking microscopic differences here.
-:sigma.SB

RTFA... may be utter BS, but they're talking about 10-15ms lower latency. (Sounds like BS to me btw. The hardocp.com "article" reads like an ad.)

but they magically developed a network of quantum tunnels through the earth's mantle, so that instead of having to go around the circumference of the earth, your packets go straight to the person in europe or asia.

See, normally, around the curved surface of the earth, your latency is limited by the speed of light, which travels at 186,000 miles/second. And that is putting it liberally - in a vacuum, without any hardware between, without using electrons over wires -- just plain old light. But even with a direct fiber optic connection, your packet will take 0.01 seconds to go from Dallas to New York, which is 1,860 miles. Thats 10 milliseconds. If you want to go from, say, New York to Tokyo the minimum is 0.036 seconds - 36 milliseconds.

(distances - http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/cursortrail.html)

So the good folks at Killer have obviously worked around this problem by developing, as I said, quantum tunnels through the Earth's mantle. Using tachyon field emitters, they go straight through the Earth instead of around it - ... reducing the distance between .. err. oh wait. Nevermind. Even if you transmitted straight through the Earth, you would still have a dozen or more milliseconds of latency - the Earth at the equator is roughly 7,900 miles across. (http://geography.about.com/library/faq/blqzdiameter.htm).

Unless of course you are breaking the known bounds of engineering and physics, and transmitting information faster than light.

PS, if you are stupid, here is the equation

186000 miles / 1 second = city-to-city miles / x seconds.

solve for x

x = city-to-city miles / 186000

from the anandtech review:

"Our test results cannot be accurately replicated by our readers, other review sites, or even ourselves in a very controlled environment. Our test results are accurate based upon the criteria we utilized at the time of testing but they cannot be consistently replicated."

WOW.

who needs christians attacking science in the schools, the 'computer gaming' press is doing plenty to attack science on its own. ie, you dont need repeatable experiments, anecdotal evidence is equivalent to empirical evidence, getting payed to do research is not a conflict of interest, etc etc etc .

so much for western civilization.

Uhh, what? "Yeeaah, our tests show it will reduce latency time for you. No, we can't show you it, you have to buy the card first. Yes, you bought the card, but we never said our tests were reliable"

That's absotively absurd.