2D Quality and Bundle
Much like the AOpen board I reviewed recently, the ASUS exhibits pin sharp 2D display quality that betters all recent boards I've had the pleasure of looking at. It's not a trait that's common to the reference board but whatever is responsible for the best looking analogue output I've ever seen, it's most welcome. While it's a qualitative assessment at best, my eyes aren't your eyes blah blah, it's something worth commenting on.Bundle
The bundle is unchanged from the past few months across a bunch of card releases. Nothing new from the V9950 game bundle we saw back when it was released, for a card as expensive as a V9980U/TVD or A9800XT/VTD (you get the same bundle with the Radeon), I'd want to see at least an extra title if they insist on shipping such a similar bundle. Something to make it stand out. You get Half Life 2 with Radeon XTs, something not as ostentatious as the vapourware Valve title would have done fine for the NVIDIA boards in this price bracket.
As well as the CD set, which includes includes a copy of ASUS DVD (with full GPU support) and the driver/utility CD, you also get Power Director for creating movie CD/DVDs from video captured using the card. It's a full VIVO card, capturing from S-Video or composite video sources using the Philips ASIC. The dongle is the same as shipped with the ASUS Radeon 9800XT.
No S-Video or composite video cables were supplied with the review sample, you're assumed to have your own. They aren't expensive but an S-Video cable wouldn't have gone amiss, just in case. A further CD contains the Media Show application for capturing video. The capture driver is WDM compatible, applications which use the standard DirectX video interfaces can also capture from the card.
The manuals, while basic, do the job and are well written. There's more accessible information on the CD however. Lastly, you get the obligatory DVI-to-VGA convertor for taking advantage of dual display setups. Dual head output is a feature long mastered by recent consumer graphics cards and while it would be nice to see dual DVI on cards in this end of the consumer sector, it's not a real turn off. As DVI equipped LCDs gain features, performance and ever more attractive prices however, I'd expect dual DVI outputs to be a feature of high end consumer graphics hardware before long.
