Crossfire HD 2900 XT vs. 8800 Ultra
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The Package
Sapphire have moved over to a new package for the HD 2900 XT, and I must say it looks great! It’s up a bit on size compared to our standard VGA box, but this is becoming quite common on higher end cards these days. It’s a bit annoying from a freight perspective but the cards are also getting bigger so it does make sense.
The front of the box has a see-through panel which lets us view the front of the card; We also have the main features listed across the bottom. We can see there is mention of HDMI, VIVO, Black Box and 3DMark. This is all very standard these days but it’s nice to see a new box from Sapphire.
Moving inside we again have another healthy package which seems to be pretty consistent with HD 2900 XT cards. Apart from the boring manual we have PowerDVD and PowerDirector from Cyberlink, 3DMark 06, a driver CD and the Black Box voucher.
Connectivity is also pretty full on with two DVI to VGA connectors, a DVI to HDMI dongle, HDTV Out, VIVO and lastly a crossfire cable. These handy additions compliment the whole package rather nicely.
The big packages are pretty common nowadays. Palit have included an extra game next to Valve’s Black Box. ASUS included S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with Black Box as well. Then there is Sapphire who have given us a full version of 3DMark 06 for good measure. AMD and its partners had better be careful as we could get very used to this. It’s more than we can say for some NVIDIA partners who don’t even include a game at all.
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