I’ve expressed my opinion on, as I put it, this performance NIC nonsense. But it’d be silly to pretend that if you’re interested in the best performance possible, you shouldn’t lay out out a little extra to make sure every piece of your computer is optimized. Alienware knows people like doing that, and they’ve partnered Bigfoot to offer the Killer 2100 NIC in their desktops.
More good news: they’ve reduced the price to $80, which is much more reasonable (though not nearly low enough for me) than the $129 it was a few months back. If you’re a performance junkie, it might be worth the extra bills. But I’ll stick with my dusty old on-board ethernet and budget cabling for now.