Ya. When I bought C&C Renegade it was in one of those boxes. I easily could have carried behind another rack, opened it, got the cd case out, walked out. It's a bit more obvious to tell if you have like an 8x12 (guess?) box :)
Isn't it the UDP crap that affects how you ping in games? I've heard of a lot of people having awesome dl/ul speeds (1.5/256+), but ping higher than me (512/128 max).
and most likely, your NIC isn't slowing it down. The nic is rated for 100mbits/s. I doubt it'd be limiting to around 1-3mbit :)
i'd wait now. gf3 is getting old, and ati and powervr are expected to make releases soon. (prices going down on 8500 then, and powervr always has a moderate price)