I'm getting a new NIC for my PC (for gaming) and I have reached an impasse between two cards. I first heard about the the Killer NIC and the lag reduction looked pretty impressive, but I later heard from a few people that the Intel PRO/1000 series can do twice the work at about half the price. Could someone help me decide, I'd very much appreciate it.

Not likely to do any difference at all for gaming. The "killer nic" is an amazing victory of marketing over substance. Your computer has virtually no effect on any lag you experience in game.

EDIT: Aand surprise! Google reveals: blind testing subjects were either 1. wrong or 2. unable to discern a difference:

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/478/5/

Judge for yourself if you think it's worth $210 extra over the built in and perfectly working NIC on your motherboard to run a torrent client built into the NIC.

(And the measured average ping was 103 vs 100, not exactly a statistically certain difference.)

Thanks for the advice!

However, do you think this is just in the case of the Killer series or network cards in general?

The amount of CPU time devoted to network processing is so tiny that any network card that works is everything a semi-normal person needs. For servers that spend all their time running at 90% CPU usage, a NIC with a hardware processor on it can make a significant difference, but not even the most extreme single computer user can approach server level traffic.

I'm getting a new NIC for my PC (for gaming) and I have reached an impasse between two cards. I first heard about the the Killer NIC and the lag reduction looked pretty impressive, but I later heard from a few people that the Intel PRO/1000 series can do twice the work at about half the price. Could someone help me decide, I'd very much appreciate it.

Not likely to do any difference at all for gaming. The "killer nic" is an amazing victory of marketing over substance. Your computer has virtually no effect on any lag you experience in game.

EDIT: Aand surprise! Google reveals: blind testing subjects were either 1. wrong or 2. unable to discern a difference:

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/478/5/

Judge for yourself if you think it's worth $210 extra over the built in and perfectly working NIC on your motherboard to run a torrent client built into the NIC.

(And the measured average ping was 103 vs 100, not exactly a statistically certain difference.)

Thanks for the advice!

However, do you think this is just in the case of the Killer series or network cards in general?

The amount of CPU time devoted to network processing is so tiny that any network card that works is everything a semi-normal person needs. For servers that spend all their time running at 90% CPU usage, a NIC with a hardware processor on it can make a significant difference, but not even the most extreme single computer user can approach server level traffic.