Customer Reviews

EVGA 128-P2-KN01-TR Killer Xeno Pro Gaming Network Card

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Here are some features printed on the box and my explanations:
1) "Gigabit ethernet". It only _connects_ at 1 gigabit speed. When you try to transfer a file over the network the real speed wouldn't be more than 7-9 Mb/s (less than 100Mbit/s). This is not a bug, this is how manufacturer originally developed the card and this is admitted on official forum.
2) "USB port for Torrent and FTP storage". Physically the port presents on the device but the problem is - it cannot be used since drivers (of any version for any OS) do not support it. It's unclear when the functionality will be supported.
3) "Hardware firewall". In current drivers' version it's just a simplest filtering application. Techincally you can call it "firewall" but in fact it isn't.
4) "Hardware accelerated voice chat". The acceleration only works for Teamspeak 1.0 and their own Xeno Chat. You cannot use benefits of the card if you're using any other application (like Ventrilo or ever Teamspeak 2). In-game voice chats are not supported as well.
5) "Better Internet tools on an embedded Linux platform". The card is running Linux on PowerPC processor so technically this is true - there are such tools. But they are unavailable for you since you don't have access to the embedded system.

Drivers:
1) There are no Windows 7 drivers. There are Vista onces and they somehow work under Win7 but my system several times gone to BSOD when using network. Couple of times this happen under Vista.
2) Windows XP 64-bit is not supported at all. This is not stated in specification but there is a nice stiker on the box.

I've tried this card in real games (Battlefield, WoW, CS) - didn't mention any latency improvement. May be this is because of connecting to Internet via a router (they slow down traffic a bit), but anyway I'm not ready to disconnect my whole home network from the internet. I suggest most of people have the similar situation at home.

If you like this device read the manufacturer's forum first - you'll find a lot of feedbacks there (both positive and negative). After a week of testing I decided to return the card back to the store. It definitly doesn't worth its price: $30-$40 could be a price but not more.

Btw, I have two more products of EVGA: video card and mother board. They both just perfect. It was a great surprise for me with this network card.

Okay, I bought this primarily because the idea of a ppc linux box that I could hack in a PCIe slot was cool. I'd read lots of reviews, both positive and negative when the killer nic first came out, but I couldn't justify the price. Then they released Xeno Pro, which dropped the price substantially. As an embedded developer, I thought at worst this would end up being something I could use at work for Embedded PPC Linux testing. It isn't going to work, I won't let it leave my gaming machine.

To be fair this won't fix the internet. If you have a bad router between you and the game server you still will have a bad connection. However at this point, I know any problems are not from my gaming machine. My pings seem to vary less, especially under extreme graphical stress (lots of players in the same area, grenades exploding everywhere, aerial bombardment etc). This is not a placebo effect. It is an improvement. You will get your best improvments in games that use udp vs. tcp.

The only problem at this point and what almost made me mark this 4 stars instead of 5 is that the firewall app is not available yet, but that should come with the next driver release.

I noticed absolutely no improvement at all in gaming or networking. I have other EVGA products and love them all, but this product is snake oil as stated in a previous post. Save your money and upgrade in areas that will actually help your performance.

I installed this card months ago and have since taken it out of my system after major driver bugs and issues with Vista 64. It works ... as a NIC. But then again, so does my onboard port. I'm running a Core i7 processor heavily overclocked and the benefit of offloading network data from my CPU is pretty much lost entirely, as my CPU is more than capable of doing the job. From my perspective, this product is total snake oil. I saw zero benefit in either ping or "feel" and have no doubt that many who experience "smoother gameplay" are under the influence of a powerful placebo effect.

It seems that the only people who really see a benefit are those using older computers, and even then it's a very very minor benefit. And if you're in the market for a $130 network card for an old computer, you should really invest in a newer video card or CPU or more RAM ... you'd see far more benefit.

The fact that this product was yanked off Newegg after terrible reviews and many returns should give any potential purchaser pause.

I installed this NIC and it didn't help my ping one little bit; that was after I reinstalled my OS from XP x64 to 32-bit because there are no XP x64 drivers for this NIC. It was a big waste of time and money. Thanks to Amazon for making my RMA process nice and easy.

The Xeno Pro gaming network card helps improve your online game play, notice both boost in Frame Rates, better in game ping experiences, plus overall smoother game play ie, noticed less LAG.

Easy to install, works well