The box is really cool looking, you can really tell that XFX is trying to market the card towards people who want high quality gaming video cards rather than those people who just want their computer to work. It’s cool that you can see the card through the little window in the box.
The card comes in a plastic container to keep it safe, you also get a S-Video cable so you can take advantage of the TV out feature of this card. You get a trial version of DroneZ, Space Haste, and GunLock and a full version of PowerDVD which are not pictured because they were out of CDs at the time of shipping.
The card comes with a brownish PCB which is unique, I have not seen many video cards with a brown PCB. It is not as stunning as some of the other colors out there but different people like different colors, or so I’m told.
The card has a standard VGA input for your average CRT and also has S-Video out so that you can hook your video card to your TV. The card is lacking a DVI connection so if you are looking to use a LCD you will have to get a converter or get another video card.
The card comes stock with passive cooling of the GPU and lacking RAMsinks. I would have really liked to have seen active cooling on the GPU and even some RAMsinks. I know that they did not include either of these things on this video card because it is for more of a non-overclocker and more end user rather than high end gamer. A good reason to have better cooling on lower end video cards is the ability to overclock them better. When I removed the heatsink on the GPU I found that about half of the core was not covered with thermal goop which is also not good because it does not have active cooling it needs to transfer heat to the heatsink which is harder to do with no thermal interface material. These are a few things which I think XFX should address in the future.
