What is the bundle that Gigabyte has decided to provide, is it worth the "$190" that the box claims.  They provide a few useful utilities, from Cyberlink they gave PowerDVD 6, if you don't already have DVD software on the computer.  Also provided is PowerDirector 3 for editing and capturing the Vi part of ViVo.  In the game section of this bundle is Valve's CounterStrike Condition Zero, which shows off the power of all newer ATi based video cards.  Otherwise a game called Xpand Rally was included.  While this game is slightly older, but still a Direct X 8.1 game, it has some very nice graphics for a rally game.

    Next lets look at the included cables.  The first picture shows the standard cables most expect from a video card these days, a DVI-VGA converter, a S-VHS cable and a S-VHS-Composite connector.  The second picture shows the unique items that Gigabyte has included.  First we see the ViVo cable, for both S-VHS and composite, this would really make the S-VHS to composite connector useless as both connectors are provided for on the cable.  Next is an addition I personally liked to see, that of a component connector, for those who have TV's without DVI or VGA but do have component connections to their TV.

    Now lets look at the star of the review, the GV-RX18L256V-B.  First a look at the outer portion of the card, the side of the card is dominated by the heatsink with only the power portion of the card being viewable here.  The back of the card is pretty bare, with no memory chips or much else in the way of silicon on this side.  The main thing that you see is the mounting holders for the heatsink, eight screws in all.  Moving onto the outputs of the card, we see that Gigabyte has nicely decided to put Dual DVI ports on the card, with the ViVo S-VHS connector being sandwiched in-between.  On the other side of the card we see two basic things, first the PCIe power connector along with its associated power regulators, etc.  The other thing that we notice is the fact that this card is a single slot solution, which means you can use more slots as they aren't blocked by the video cards' heatsink.  Will this hamper the overclocking of our sample, we will see later on.

    We will now take a brief look at the devices underneath the heatsink.  First on the list is the GPU, which as one would expect is a R520 core, which is the base of all the x1800 series of video cards.  Hubert has discussed much of the new features of this core in his AIW X1800XL review, so we will not get into much detail there.  Needless to say the fact that it has over 320 million transistors using a 90nm process makes this one packed device.  Next is the RAM which is Samsung FBGA GDDR3 memory.  This RAM is rated at 1.4ns thus giving it a rated clock speed of 700MHz (1.4GHz DDR).  Lastly is the good old Rage Theater chip, which I still say needs to be replaced by the Rage Theater 200 chip, which should provide a better video capture, but we will see if that is the case in our video capture tests.