Bundle and presentation
GALAXY's Glacier 6800 128MB card arrives in an oversized, understated box. Gone are the monsters and power-filled figures that are meant to show you just how powerful a manufacturer's card is. I like the minimalist approach here.
The supplied instruction manual is an English-only affair. It's brief but manages to cover both hardware and software installation well enough for a novice user to feel comfortable about installing the card and updating drivers. Like most other manufacturers now, GALAXY uses a single manual to cover its entire range of cards. For example, there's a section devoted to VIVO adapters that is obviously not required on this vanilla 6800 card. A separate, card-specific manual isn't too much to ask for, is it?. CD players, cheap TVs and almost any electrical equipment you can think of have their own personalised documentation. It's a shame that some £400 3D accelerators, in the case of an Ultra model, can't be supplied with the same.
GALAXY adds in a rather short Molex extender, obviously needed as the card requires a single Molex connection. There's also a short S-Video extension cable that's only good for TV-Out duty and the ubiquitous DVI dongle. GALAXY has included a couple of full gaming titles, Chaser and Moto GP2. Both are solid titles that play smoothly on the Glacier 6800. It's nice to see a board partner adding in some gaming fun. CyberLink's PowerDVD 5 is the software DVD player of choice.
Driver CDs are liable to change at any time. GALAXY's v18 included an overclocking utility that integrated into the control panel, exactly like Coolbits. I appreciate that the Glacier 6800 128MB has a pre-overclocked core running at 350MHz but given the use of Hynix's 2.2ns memory, a performance setting of, say, 350MHz core and 750MHz memory would have been nice. The bonus downloads, incidentally, cover a range of skins, wallpapers, NVIDIA demos, screensavers, and technology videos that showcase GeForce 6 power.
