X-bit labs

PowerColor X1950 Pro SCS3 Graphics Card: The Big and The Silent (page 2)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

[ 05/23/2007 | 12:10 PM ]

Package and Accessories

The product comes in PowerColor’s standard, rather small, box:

It is designed somewhat differently to the package we described in our PowerColor X1950 Pro Extreme review. Some captions have vanished at the bottom of the box, the ATI logo and the Windows Vista Ready certificate are now painted in a different way, and the PCI Express emblem has moved from the top right corner and is now right above the letter X in the product model name. The bottom right corner is occupied by two stickers one of which tells you that the card is equipped with a silent cooler Arctic Cooling SCS3 while the other one reports some important info about the card’s dimensions and warns you that you can have problems installing it into certain system cases due to the non-standard cooler. The amount of memory and the configuration of connectors are also indicated on the box.

Inside the glossy wrapping there is a white cardboard box divided into compartments. The graphics card is wrapped in an antistatic bag and is accompanied with the following accessories:

• Molex → 6-pin PCI Express power converter;
• DVI-I → D-Sub converter;
• VIVO (S-Video/RCA In/Out) splitter;
• YPbPr splitter;
• S-Video cable;
• RCA cable;
• Rear panel bracket with vent holes;
• Brief user guide;
• CD disk with drivers;
• CD disk with CyberLink DVD Solution.

This is PowerColor’s typical set of accessories. The only surprising thing is the lack of a flexible connector for uniting two X1950 Pro cards into a CrossFire subsystem. The X1950 Pro SCS3 section of the company’s website does not mention that connector, but says it is included with the other X1950 Pro models. This may be explained by the product’s targeting at silent computer systems, for users who need silent rather than top-performing components. Considering the dimensions of the card’s cooler, this is logical, although arguable, solution.

The brief user manual is designed in a new format. It used to be a voluminous brochure describing in detail every aspect of the graphics card installation and usage. Now it is a multilingual poster that gives the user just some basic information about installing the card into the system. This is actually all the documentation you get with your PowerColor X1950 Pro – the full electronic user manual is missing on the driver CD.

The CyberLink DVD Solution disc enclosed with the card is a collection of software for processing audio and video content. It includes the following programs:

• PowerDirector
• MediaShow
• MusicMatch
• PowerBackup
• PowerDVD
• PowerProducer
• Power2Go
• PowerDVD Copy

All the programs are licensed versions except for PowerBackup and PowerDVD which are trials. The PowerColor X1950 Pro SCS3 being a multimedia more than games-oriented product, this disc is a very appropriate bonus. So, we don’t have any gripes about the packaging and accessories of the described PowerColor card, except for the rather too simplified user manual.