The box of this video card is kind of plain; the top of the box has a formula one race car on it which goes along with the Daytona name. The back of the box has a few specifications in twelve languages which is more than enough I think. The box was really light which kind of surprised me because I figured there would be more inside.
The card comes in a regular anti-static bag to keep it from being damaged which is a good thing. The PCB of this video card is purple which I really like because purple is my favorite color. There is a good sized heatsink on the GPU so that it will be adequately cooled even though it is a lower model of card. Normally lower end cards have only a passive heatsink on them which does not dissipate heat as well as an active one. There is no cooling for the RAM on this video card because it will not get hot enough at stock speeds. From the side of the card you can see that there is a VGA, S-Video, and DVI port which is really cool because a lot of times budget card will only have a VGA port.
This video card is pretty lacking as far as extras are concerned. The only thing this video card comes with is a S-Video cable and a driver CD. This is pretty much expected because this is a budget video card and if they added all kinds of goodies the price would be too high. The only thing that I would have liked to see included would have been a DVI to VGA adaptor.
I like the fact that this video card is using BGA (Ball Grid Array) RAM chips because this is a budget model video card which would normally use the older style of RAM chips which are rectangular. With BGA RAM chips you are usually able to get a little bit more of an overclock out of your video card than with the older chips which is a nice bonus. This GeForceFX 5200 Ultra is using Samsung 3.6ns chips which should do pretty well when it comes to overclocking.
The heatsink is held on by two plastic clips which is pretty standard and are easy to remove. After taking the heatsink off I found a really good amount of thermal compound on the core so that there is good heat transfer happening. A lot of the time the thermal compound will be a pretty poor but this is not the case with this card. You can also see that the heatsink has a sufficient amount of compound as well.
I cleaned off the core of the GPU to take some pictures and as you can see the card is of course using the GeForceFX. I then reapplied thermal compound to the core, replaced the heatsink, and installed the card to my system. The card installed with no problem and did not interfere with anything on the motherboard.
