Package and Accessories

The product comes packaged into a medium-sized box designed in XFX’ traditional austere style with a minimum of design extravaganza.

Some design elements, like the werewolf’s mask, are glossy and look very effective on the matte background, matching the exquisite nature of the product contained in the box. Although XFX offers three versions of GeForce 8800 Ultra differing in clock rates, there is no mention of the particular model on the front or rear panel of the box. This may be somewhat confusing for the buyer. There is only a sticker on the bottom of the box that tells you the model name as well as the ordering code, “PV-T80U-SHD9” in our case. This should mean the fastest version of GeForce 8800 Ultra offered by XFX, with the XXX index. According to the official XFX website, its GPU should be clocked at 675/1667MHz and its memory, at 1150 (2300) MHz. The real frequencies of our card are not such, as you’ll see shortly. Our sample proved to be a copy of the less fast Extreme version.

The box is surprisingly stout for its dimensions, perhaps due to the manufacturer’s desire to protect the card as much as possible during transportation and storage. There is another box, made from thick corrugated cardboard, inside the external one and it is filled up with foam rubber except for a small compartment with accessories. The card lies snugly in a tray, wrapped into an antistatic pack. It is covered from above with one more sheet of foam rubber. The accessories compartment contains the following:

• 2 DVI-I-to-D-Sub converters;
• Universal YPbPr/S-Video/Composite splitter;
• S-Video cable;
• Brief installation guide;
• CD disk with drivers;
• DVD disk with Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter game.

There are no power adapters among the accessories. This might be a cause for worry with the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB, but the person who buys such an expensive graphics card as GeForce 8800 Ultra has surely taken care to have a modern PSU with a couple of 6-pin or even 8-pin PCI Express connectors.

The manual included into the box is very simple but offers instructions about how to install the card into the system, recommendations on organizing proper ventilation in your system case and information on the compatibility of different mini-DIN connectors you can use for an analog connection to a TV-set.

So, the packaging and accessories of the XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme are good. The box looks attractive and protects the card from damage effectively while the accessories include everything you may want to use the graphics card normally. An additional point in favor of the card is the included copy of the popular tactical shooter Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter .