Date: February 18th, 2005
Article by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner, Head Editor & Hardware Reviewer)
Product Submitted by: ATI
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PRODUCT SPECIFICATIONS

PRODUCT COMPOSITION

Seeing this card is rather expensive and can range from US$599-US$820 from different manufacturers, the product hardware and software kits will vary. The kit in this example was acceptable when it came to hardware, but the software bundle for a lack of a better word sucked big time.

Basically all that was included was a VIVO dongle, a HDTV output dongle, a DVI to VGA adapter, a software CD and the user's manual.

Also included was the 4 pin molex power cable needed for powering up this pixel crunching beast. The card will not run without it. I would also highly recommend you hook this power cord up to an independent channel with no other peripherals being power. For maximum stability during use and overclocking , you have to keep the power available at a maximum and power fluctuations to minimum.

Taking a step back, I was quite disappointed to see nothing in the way of bundled games or even a demo. Let me break it down. You just handed over more than a half a grand for a uber elite high performance videocard and they can't even give you a small cheap game to test this card with? That's like buying a brand new corvette from a dealer and having to tow it to the gas station to put gas in it. Can this be summed up as the definition of being stingy, you're damn right. These comments are towards the ATI branded product and most third party manufacturers do include something to play with out of the box.

Although I will go into the card more intimately in the next section, my first impression was "Wow, what a nice cooler". Next thing to pop out was "Holy hell, this thing is heavy!" No doubt this has to be one of the heaviest videocards I have ever tested. Why is it heavy?

I will point that out in the next section.