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The Box

The Asus EAH3870 TOP comes in a big gray box, with the two familiar soldiers of Company of Heroes Opposing Fronts, taking up about half the box. Sometimes, bundeled games only warrant a sticker on a video card's box -- it's interesting to see how far Asus teamed up with Relic to cross-promote their video card with this AAA title. Opening the box's cover up reveals more about Opposing Fronts, as well as a mention of a new piece of Asus software: the Gamer OSD. However, the box does lack listing the game's minimum system requirements.

The TOP (Top Overclocking Performance) branding is also very noticeable here -- so no searching serial codes to see if you are getting the overclocked version of the card. A marketing graph boldly embellishes the performance gains of the overclocked TOP card to a "generic" HD 3870.

The back of the box features eleven languages, and a little bit about the bundled software, which I will go over next.

The Bundle

The bundled software for the Asus EAH3870 is quite nice. Foremost, of course, you get the excellent Opposing Fronts. While perhaps not really suitable for a casual gamer, most potential HD 3870 owners out there would love a copy of this WW2 strategy game made by Relic. Besides being a stand-out real-time strategy game, Opposing Fronts also looks great, and compliments the abilities of the HD 3870.

Besides this game, the Asus EAH3870 also comes with a collection of good applications. Of particular personal appreciation, SmartDoctor was a pleasant and easy piece of software to use. This program can further overclock the Asus EAH3870, monitor its temperature, and control its fan.  Not sure why there is no shader clock overclocking feature, but anyways, a good program nonetheless. A new arrival into the Asus software collection, GamerOSD, is also included with the HD 3870. This is a light but useful program that can be used to take screenshots, movies, and measure FPS and overclocking efficiency with.

Further rounding out the software bundle are Splendid (a video player) and Video Security Online (which can be used to visually monitor your home remotely).

Beyond software, the Asus HD 3870 comes with: a driver CD, a thick quick-start pamphelt, a leather DVD case, a CrossFire bridge, a S-Video to composite adapter, a DVI to HDMI adapter, a DVI to VGA adapter, HDTV cable, and a molex-to-PCIE power adapter.

All in all, a very complete bundle.