|
First thing I noticed when I opened the box was the bright red PCB and HSF. It's what my little boy would call Fire Engine red and is a very refreshing break from the norm. This card was designed not just for performance but with good looks in mind too (gonna have to get a red motherboard now just so I don't clash). The next thing I noticed was the size and weight. This is a BIG card, being over half again as big as my GeForce 2 GTS and PRO cards.
If you look at the pictures you can see that the ram on this card has been covered with very attractive red anodized heatsinks on both sides, which should aid in overclocking. More on that later though.
On top of the card you can't miss the Nvidia reference design cooler, although again this is coloured Fire Engine red. At the back end of the card you can see the capacitors, all of the low level variety. Whether this will actually help those having trouble installing these cards in certain motherboards I couldn't say as there is plenty of room in my current system for it.
The PCI faceplate has all the connectors, in this case 2 DVI ports and an S-Video port. This is where the 2 DVI to VGA adaptors come into play. This is at time of writing the only card that I know of that has 2 DVI ports as well as the adaptors included for normal VGA output. A very nice touch that, however I'm not to keen on the adaptors themselves.
If you look at this picture you can clearly see that the weight of the monitor cable and the adaptor being so long will put a lot of extra and unnecessary stress on the DVI port. I would have preferred to see some form of adaptor cable rather than this box affair.
In an effort to offer you a little of the Radeons AIW cards appeal of video in and out, there is an S-Video in and out cable included. Utilizing the onboard Phillips chip, this will give you TV out to a maximum of 800 x 600 as well as video capture. There is also an included PCI Firewire card using the VIA chipset with 3 ports on the face plate and also an internal port.
Very nice additions indeed and having the Firewire card as a separate component mean's it will last beyond the life time of the GeForce card itself. All of the software you would need as far as drivers and applications for all this are included too. The Video editing software WinProducer and WinCoder do there jobs admirably, and have support for mpeg1 or 2 encoding, AVI or DVI (easy enough to re-encode in a different format such as DivX but would have been nice to be able to do that off the bat). Having the support for DVI serves 2 purposes; you can grab straight from say a camcorder in HI8 format, edit it, then up it back to the camcorder via either the Firewire or the S-Video.You can easily capture a stream from the card straight to harddrive (if you have the room!). There are a few transisitions and special effects you can use as well as titling functions which should be enough for the average user.
The card itself also has hardware motion compensation for DVD playback which goes quite a way to giving a better picture, and the included Gainward branded WinDVD software will make full use of this. Being a software DVD player, the picture isn't as good as you would get from a proper hardware solution, but it is better none the less.
Serious Sam is a good game, but not something that will take full advantage of the card. It's not all that old and great fun so a pretty good choice there, although considering the price of Serious Sam which never was that expensive, there is the possibility that a lot of people will already have it. I've seen a lot worse bundled games that's for sure.
Previous Page - Introduction
Next Page - The Software
|
