Package and Contents

The package is nicely presented and comes everything you need. You get the usual drivers on CD, instruction manual,  and one bundled game - Ghost Recon.  There's also a DVI-to-VGA converter, a 6-pin PCIe power cable as well as 2 video-out cables included ... both s-video and component. One of the first thing you'll notice about the card are the the gold DVI and S-Video connectors. It's quite rare to see these nowadays, and it's an unexpected surprise.

          

Installation

Installation was straight forward with no problems at all. The card only uses 2 PCIe slot space, and that's beacuse of the pre-installed Accelero X1 cooler by Artic Cooling. This cooler looks very impressive, and features 3 copper heatpipes which fan out to a large array of aluminum fins ... all of this is all housed in oddly looking plastic casing. The whole unit is cooled by quiet fan which spins at 500 - 2000 RPM.  It's certainly quieter than your usual stock cooler and does a great job of cooling the graphics card.

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Driver installation was very simple ... no further comment here. In our benchmark tests, we used the Nvidia's Forceware drivers version 169.25, which supports Windows Vista and the latest 8800GT (G92 GPUs).