ELP Product Reviews
| Date | By | Rating | Reviews |
| 6/25/2009 | TSadler | 5/5 | What can I say about this card, Amazing. I wish I could have kept it. The only limtitation I had was having to pull my sound card and use the onboard sound due to limited pci express slots. I'm notgoing to go into all the testing details, but pings went from an average of 75 or so to around 30, nice. I also noticed a decrease in cpu utilization as the card has its own processor. I experienced absolutely no problems with drivers or usage. Great Card, I will eventually be getting one...Thank You for the chance to test and rate this terrific card |
| 6/25/2009 | dennisocook | 3/5 | I had many issues with the 3D. Most notable was that your eyes will start to hurt soon and it takes time to adjust to the view. I also hate how the HUD (heads up display) is the closest thing to you, not good in a First Person Shooter. Your gun goes into the screen while your aimer is up in your face making aiming very difficult. This is no problem for Farcry 2, because it has no hud, and the 3d glasses are very good on that game. Dawn of War 2 is another game I was impressed with. These 3D glasses are a nice gimmik, but I advise to wait a few years for the technology to be smoother and cheaper Pros: - actually makes games 3D and adds new dimension to games (pun intended) - some games look great - Large library of already compatible games Cons: - Hurts your eyes - Uncomfortable glasses - Price - Doesn't work well on some games - The HuD is the closest thing to you, which is annoying on FPS |
| 6/25/2009 | 420Ryme | 2/5 | My Rig Q6600 3.6ghz quad core G0 Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme EVGA 780i SLI mobo 4GiG 2x2 OCZ ReaperX 800mhz 4-4-3-15-2T SLI GTX260 Core 216 EVGA Superclocks 250gig - 1TB SATA II 850W SilverStone Decathlon Windows Vista 64bit Home Premium 3Dmark Vantage Record : 21689 SLI-Zone Folding@Home Team 5k+ Points The first thing I've told my friends about this product is that when it works it's amazing but I could only manage to get it to work and be comfortable with one game. First, Thank you very much EVGA for the opportunity to test out this amazing product. I'm happy to say that I am an EVGA customer for life due to your amazing product quality and customer support/service but I’m not going to let that fact bias my testing. The box arrived to me packed well and in good shape. Once removed I quickly setup the monitor and windows found it and updated the display driver automatically for me. Right away I noticed the amazing color quality and clarity that the SyncMaster is known for. After gaming for a few hours I did find a few things I didn't like about the monitor. The main things were the Auto Contrast option would make objects appear to lose color or brightness as you moved away (zoomed out) from them. The second is that the monitor is only 1680x1050. I was hoping to be able to hit 1900x1200 and really let my graphics cards stretch there legs. Normally I game on a 46 inch 120hz LCD TV at 1920x1080 so falling down to 1680x1050 was a slight disappointment to me. But, keep in mind that the glasses will work with approved "3d" TV's as well though mine isn't in the list. (sad face) The glasses came neatly packed in a smooth cool looking package and were easily unpacked and setup. The installation note card was easy to understand and I was hooked up and ready to install drivers in about 10 minutes. Now as always I avoided the outdated driver CD and headed straight to www.nvidia.com and downloaded the latest Stereoscopic 3d software/driver package. Nvidia, why does everyone insist on providing the antiquated, inevitably outdated driver CD still? Everyone knows that it's outdated as soon as it's burned/printed so why bother? Anyway, I took a quick look at the FAQ on the drivers page and noted a few games that I owned that were listed as Excellent compatibility. Need For Speed Carbon, Far Cry 2, Need For Speed Undercover and COD 4. Being a life long fan of the Need For Speed games (until pro street ruined it) I thought I would reinstall Carbon and use that as my first test app. I fired up the glasses (which fit great even over my normal glasses THANK YOU!) and ran through Nvidia test's and was able to configure the glasses at around 30% comfortably and kicked off the game. I was in shock, these glasses turned an already fun, dark, fast paced game into a life like experience. When you run into a mail box or parking meter at 100mph it really felt like it was flying up over the hood and right out of the screen past your head. I may have even found myself ducking at a few points. On the other hand there were a few points that soured the experience for me. For some reason I constantly, every 10-15 minutes was being thrown from 3d rendering back into normal rendering mode and would have to press the button on the IR emitter to switch back to 3d. This not only took me out of the gaming experience but a few times caused my machine to blue screen prompting a sigh, hands slammed on the desk and a reboot. Over all I was amazed by the technology, but I don't think it's ready for the main stream gaming community just yet. I read a review by ChrisRay at the SLI-Zone forums when the product first came out, so I had a heads up in the fact that each frame is rendered twice adding a pseudo AA effect so 2x or 4x AA is all you really need and probably all you will be able to push as the rendering method used for 3d effectively doubles the workload on your GPU's. With my rig I was able to run Carbon at 1680x1050 with 4xAA and all settings maxed out and never saw a drop from V-sync 120hz which made me very happy. This is where the party ended for me. I finished Carbon in 3 days time and decided to move on to Far Cry 2 which I thought would look amazing but was totally wrong. Now if you have played the game I'm sure you loved walking around in the jungle brushing up against those beautiful jungle plants that almost seem to jump off the screen (even without 3d). With that in mind I fired her up and found myself totally disoriented. I followed the tool tips and disabled or toned down which ever options it said to but still found shadows completely skewed and the sky looking odd. I loaded from a previously saved game and instantly was getting shot at but I couldn't even find where from. I tried this for about 30 min and was so disappointed I gave up. Next up was COD4 which fell to pretty much the same results. It seems that in these first person shooters there is just way to much going on to be able to concentrate on the 3d effect while still keeping yourself alive. Also ignoring all of the little defects and things out of place added to the distraction. Once I figured this out I popped in NFS Under Cover which I had never played before. Things started out well until I realized that the game is EXTREAMLY CPU limited and my frame rates were effected so much that I couldn’t stand the constant flickering and had to give up. I even tried to force as much AA as I could to try and direct the bottleneck to the GPU’s and my they wouldn’t even heat up while my CPU sat and spun at 70+%. What a disappointment of a game. That was the end of my testing. I wish I could have kept them longer and tested with more games but time fly’s when you are having fun and alas I had to send them on to the next poor guy. I did charge them up for him though! Again, Thank you to EVGA for the opportunity to test these products! I hope you offer more of these ELP's because I would love to try more. ChrisRay’s Review - http://forums.slizone.com/index.php?showtopic=31949 420Ryme @ SLI-Zone (info page – questions and comments always welcome) http://forums.slizone.com/index.php?showuser=25114 Ps. I did feel like the terminator and my girl did make fun of me… but these won’t be back. |
| 6/25/2009 | 1krziriceboi | 5/5 | Great motherboard, only for certain people that wants the best of the best. |
| 6/25/2009 | ~The_Dude~ | 4/5 | When comparing the NIC to other NIC type cards I have used in the past I found little difference in the overall performance of speeds and latency. However there isn't another product on the market as capable as this card. I would say this card is worth the cash if you could utilize the bit torrent and SDK features. My main issue with this card is the VOIP pass through. I found using the pass through cable to my audio card caused system instability using commonly found and used hardware on multiple configurations. I also had issues with Steam and other MIC apps when the MIC was defaulted to the NIC. When I used the supplied teamspeak client it seemed to work fine. Overall I would say unless you plan on developing apps with the SDK, save your money and just buy a better GPU or Motherboard. I would like to see the SDK community turn my opinion around. |
| 6/15/2009 | boredgunner | 5/5 | The EVGA Killer Xeno Pro is an overall great product. Starting from the packaging, all the way to the performance it shows. The only downside to the Killer Xeno Pro is that it may be hard to get it working. The software is kind of a pain to work with and chances are, you'll have to follow a troubleshooting guide. Once the card is up and running, you'll be pleased with the results. I tested this card in Crysis Wars and Left 4 Dead - two online shooters. In Crysis Wars, I saw latency reductions by up to 20 m/s in foreign servers. This was a very nice increase. In heavily populated areas, the frame rate was smoother as well. I saw an increase of up to 10 FPS. In Left 4 Dead, I got similar results, except the latency reduction was above 15 almost all the time. The FPS increase was also more noticeable, ranging from 10-15 FPS. Of course, it wasn't noticeable since I run the game over 60 FPS with or without the card. If you're in the market for the one of the very best network processing unit, you are not going to get much better than this. It is the best NPU I know of, until the Killer Xeno Ultra arrives. |
| 6/15/2009 | pat767 | 3/5 | I can't rate this a 1 or a 5; I have to go in the middle at 3. Even worse than this, I cannot even right a decent review. Why not? Turns out I do not have stereoscopic vision. Yep... I was wondering why I couldn't set up the 3d glasses correctly. I could not even see the little black box in the medical test portion of the setup. When I asked my wife to check, she saw the little black square perfectly. I went to the optometrist over the weekend and that is when I learned I couldn't see 3D. It also explains why I couldn't see those magic 3D puzzles in high school. This was a waste of for EVGA, I apologize. For me, it was a waste time and money. |
| 6/11/2009 | nickmagnus | 3/5 | I could not get the glasses to work right for me. I kept getting headaches when playing fps games. It seems 3d still has some ways to go. As for the 120hz monitor. That thing is great. Its so smooth. I hope to get a 30inch samsung one when they are available |
| 6/11/2009 | CogentCreations | 2/5 | I had been curious about Killer NICs since they first came out. It seemed like a pretty decent idea to increase game performance; so I was very happy when EVGA selected me to review one of these cards. The card itself comes with a couple audio connectors, a USB port and of course an Ethernet port. I did not test the USB or audio ports, after this entire card is all about internet gaming performance. The other features seemed to be added value but missed the mark for really being useful. Install went smoothly, disabled all onboard NICs, dropped the card in and installed the software for it. The software install does write a firmware to the card for about 4 minutes which could cause possible corruption if interrupted. The software has bandwidth control features which can limit your connection so downloads don't interfere with gaming. While this is a nice feature, anyone serious about gaming will not be running a bunch of downloads in the background with or without bandwidth control. The chat also comes with a voice chat client, Xeno chat, again value added but I doubt almost anyone will use it. Sadly, after testing the card, I saw very little difference between the card and my onboard NIC. Ping times remained about the same, within +/- 10ms of each other. I would say that is pretty close of the margin of error for tests that involve so many outside factors. FPS stayed pretty constant in my tests as well. Most of latency happens outside the local network so this card is unable to make any great improvements. Anyone claiming improvements of 100ms+ seems highly unlikely. In my opinion the card is pretty much busted. The features it claims don't really show up in real world testing with a good connection to the internet. While I won't be spending my money to purchase one of these cards, I would however consider spending an extra 20-30 dollars on a high end motherboard with an integrated Killer NIC. Cut the fat of the value added features and make a chip that can increase performance without the huge price tag. Thanks again for EVGA for allowing me to test this card. This is a unique and interesting program. |
| 6/11/2009 | russianhaxor | 1/5 | I used the Xeno for about a week. Well, i didn't really use it persay but i attempted to. I followed the directions of the manual to a T and i could not for the life of me get the device to load the drivers whatsoever. I contacted Bigfoot and they couldn't help me either, they told me to try another OS install since i had tried everything else. If their 64bit support for vista is really this bad, i cannot imagine having to spend my money with such immature drivers. I'm glad that i did not have to spend much of my own money on this device to say the least. I definitely gave up on it though, even through all that troubleshooting it still just did not work. |