Bundle and presentation
AOpen's box art is kind of spooky rather than powerful. On a purely personal note, it reminds me of the devil's physical appearance in The Passion Of The Christ. AOpen also highlights the card's salient features, including 256MB of 1GHz-rated GDDR3 memory, AGP 8x interface, and NVIDIA's auto-overclocking support.
The back continues the spooky graphics theme. The packaging is very, very similar to the Ultra model's, but that's no real surprise given that companies rarely differentiated packaging on cards based around the same GPU.
It's prudent to pay careful attention to any card's bundle. NVIDIA's AIB partners' cards all look pretty similar, so a bundle, be it good, average or poor, can sway purchasing decisions in favour of one partner over another. The main manual, multilanguage in nature, devotes 14 scant pages to the English section, and it seems to cover a number of cards in brief detail. However, it does explain everything you need to know to get the card installed, both physically and driver-wise.
The driver CD covers all of AOpen's card range. It's also quite up-to-date; ForceWare 61.72 drivers are just over a month old. The main written manual is duplicated in pdf form. InterVideo's WinDVD4 (which is now 2 generations old) and WinRip are handy enough. AOpen's also bundled in a couple of retail games from JoWooD: Spellforce - The Order Of Dawn, and Arx Fatalis. Both seem to be reasonable titles.
Not only that, there's also a further 5 'Lite' games for you to exercise your new card with. Kudos to AOpen for not skimping on this front. Hardware-wise, there's the needed DVI dongle and a short S-Video-to-RCA cable. AOpen should really have included the standard 6-foot RCA extension cable, too, as how is one supposed to connect the card up to a television?. Considering just how OEM-like recent card bundles have been, AOpen's is above average.
