Bundle and presentation
SAPPHIRE's packaging is pleasant enough. All the pertinent information is contained on the box cover. The box art actually looks quite disturbing.
Being a first-tier ATI partner and one of the largest volume sellers certainly helps when it comes to negotiating what's to be included in a bundle. There's a full copy of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow (which, incidentally, has now been superceded by SC: Chaos Theory). SAPPHIRE also teams up with CyberLink and offers a full version of the company's popular PowerDVD software, this being iteration 6 and 2-channel. A paper-based manual devotes only 10 pages to the English section, although an electronic one, contained on the driver CD, goes into further depth. Hardware-wise, SAPPHIRE provides the ubiquitous DVI dongle, 6-foot-long RCA and S-Video cables, and an S-Video-to-component adapter.
The driver CD uses a handy auto-installation feature which is common on most graphics cards today. SAPPHIRE also bundles in its TRiXX overclocking software that's worthy of a mention.
TriXX is a multi-functional overclocking tool. At its heart, it allows you to overclock the core and memory just like any other OC application. However, SAPPHIRE has also added a monitoring chip that reports on board and VPU temperature.
Further, one can set the fan speed to one of several parameters, with the custom option providing fan speeds of between 19% and 100%, modified in 3% increments. There's also a useful monitoring option and a near-silent setting that reduces core and memory speeds, as well as, obviously, reducing fan speed.
A decent bundle that's highlighted by an excellent overclocking/monitoring tool.
