Bundle and presentation
The box art is quite tasteful and informative. The Ultimate Silent Series, right at the top, tells you that it's a passively-cooled card.
Hardware-wise, SAPPHIRE bundles in S-Video and RCA cables, along with an adapter between the two. There's also an S-Video-to-component (output) adapter, perfect for connecting up to decent AV equipment or displays. Note that component video, although better than RCA because it separates colour and brightness signals, is an analogue connection and therefore not quite as good as a pure digital connection such as HDMI. SAPPHIRE's relationship with CyberLink leads to PowerDVD 6 (2-channel edition) being included.
In an interesting and somewhat bold move, SAPPHIRE has chosen to turn the world of game-bundling on its head. Rather than ship a number of games on a few CDs, it has decided to launch SAPPHIRE Select. Shipping with the Radeon X800 GTO 256MB Ultimate card is a Select bundle, on an 8GB DVD, that contains a number of recent gaming titles. You're allowed to have a 1-hour trial of any of the listed games and then decide which to keep (full version), accessible via an the activation code accompanying the bundle and activated via an online verification procedure. It takes a while to load the initial trials, however, and, depending upon bundle, you can only decide to keep one or two of the full titles. What's good is that you can choose what's to your liking, rather than the manufacturer provide what is cheapest for them to do so. You can, of course, buy other titles on the DVD for a reduced rate. SAPPHIRE/ATI also include a free 10-hour trial of Guild Wars, the MMORPG game that's rather addictive.
Opening up the package reveals the bundle. SAPPHIRE's manual is multi-language in nature and devotes just 8 pages to the English section. However, SAPPHIRE also includes an electronic manual, in pdf format, on the installation CD. This 57-page manual covers all of SAPPHIRE's ATI-based cards and is reasonably thorough. SAPPHIRE adds value to the package by using a hardware-monitoring chip on the card and its own TriXX software.
You can obviously ignore the fan-speed reading on the right-hand side; the card is silent. What's a little worrying is that when under load, without any extra ventilation and in a closed case, the sample card hit over 100c, with the board temperature not that far behind at 82c. It must be noted that the card was stable at all times, but we'd seriously recommend placing an 80mm fan in close attendance. The TriXX utility also has a handy overclocking section, as well as a neat monitoring function. Further, one can also set profiles for various games, although this function ties in better with cards that use regular heatsink/fan cooling.
SAPPHIRE includes a 2-year limited warranty with this card. That's par for the industry now.
