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Review: GeCube's Radeon X850 XT Uniwise

by Ryszard Sommefeldt on 31 March 2005, 00:00

Tags: Gecube's Radeon X850 XT

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Presentation

Box
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Box
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Double you tee eff, mate. Seriously. And what's the deal with the massively out of proportion 10ft long legs? Don't get me wrong, I'm a leg and breast man as much as the next geek, but come on GeCube, enough of the advertising aimed the prepubescent, it's a £370 graphics card you're selling. If you really must use the female form on your box, get Adriana Lima or someone to pose with the board and drop the cartoony, futuristic funbags. That goes for all vendors that persist in using a variant on a futuristic animal, a girl with pneumatic enhancement that defies all probability, mermaids, and any other such nonsense.

I think the box says there's a Radeon X850 XT inside.

Inside the box there's a wealth of cables for making the most of the VIVO functionality provided by the Theater 200, the manual and the software CDs.

Cables
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Box
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Looking at that photograph of the cable bundle, you've got, from top-to-bottom: Molex to 6-pin PCI Express power adaptor, composite video extender cable, component output cable, S-Video extender cable and S-Video and composite VIVO cable. Both the RGB and VIVO cables connect to the port in between the DVI ports, ports for which you get an adaptor each.

The 154 page manual is multi-language, 46 of them dedicated to English speakers. It's well written and simple to follow, and covers everything from hardware installation to use of the supplied software. You get full copies of PowerDVD 5.0 (the two channel version) and PowerDirector 2.5 ME, both authored and published by Cyberlink Corp. There's also a driver CD containing CATALYST 4.12 (6.14.10.6497) and some horribly old installation documents for Windows NT and 2000, dated January 2001, which no-longer apply to the hardware.