Unboxing Video and Image Gallery

Here’s the unboxing video for your viewing pleasure.

The box that this card comes in is one of the best looking I have seen. One of the reasons for that is the use of Battlefield Bad Company 2 as its cover art which happens to be my favorite game at this point of time. Here is an excellent review about this game by my fellow editor, Leon. Mostly a white affair, the box is not too big. This is to be expected given that the card is small too because of its mid range status. The box does a good job of explaining the most common features and specifications of the video card such as Crossfire-X capability, 1GB GDDR5 video memory, DirectX 11, Blu-Ray decoding and most importantly the lifetime warranty. Visiontek is one of the few AMD/ATI AIBs to offer lifetime warranties on their video cards.

This video card uses a non-reference cooler that is designed by Visiontek. We are told that our review card has the Gen1 cooler, while the retail card on Newegg.com has the Gen2 cooler. This is a two slot cooler, so it will block the PCI/PCI-E slot adjacent to the PCI-E slot it is put in. The video card offers HDMI, DVI and VGA outputs. As with every video card since the HD 2000 series from AMD, you can output 5.1 audio over the HDMI from your PC.

This card carries a TDP of 61W which allows it to be powered entirely through the PCI-Express slot. Therefore, an auxiliary power connector is not required. This omission is always welcome as it means lower power usage for decent gaming performance. Lower power requirements also make this video card suitable for use in a HTPC (Home Theater PC).

Here is the 40nm GPU codenamed “Redwood” containing 627 million transistors, compared to the massive 2.15 billion inside the high-end Cypress GPU powering the HD 5800 series.