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Box'n'Bundle

Video card boxes come in all colors of the rainbow, but one color that is not usually part of a the rainbow pallete is bright neon orange. Perhaps this attention-grabbing shade is to highlight the fact that Asus was the company first out of the gates with a HD3850X2 card. The front of the box also features a sexy Asian archer chick, while the back of the box lists, in depth, all the software included with the package (GamerPSD, SmartDoctor, Splendid Video Player, and Video Security, a webcam watcher program.)

The Asus EAH3850 X2 comes with a healthy-sized bundle. It includes: a DVI to VGA adapter, a HDMI adapter, a molex to PCIE power adapter, manuals and software CDs, video out cables, and some a faux leather CD case. This is a very complete bundle -- and besides maybe wishing for a game to be thrown in -- you don't really come across any bundles better.

Overclocking

From the outset, the overclocking situation for the Asus EAH3850 X2 looked pretty good: generally HD3850 GPUs have a positive amount of potential for overclocking headroom. Not to mention, the cooler on this dual-GPU card is a capable one.

Using the SmartDoctor program to boost the fan to %100, we set out to overclock. At default clocks, the EAH3850X2 runs with a core clock of 668, and a memory clock of 1658. With not much trouble at all, we were able to get the core up to 772 MHz (about a 15% OC), and the memory zipping along at 1926 MHz (16% OC). This level overclock is good -- not astounding, but pretty good. While you would probably not to run the fan at %100 all the time, I would recommend to folks to overclock the EAH3850X2 by about 60 MHz for the core, and about 150 MHz for the memory. At these speeds you won't run into any loud noises with the fan automatically controlled by the SmartDoctor, and you shouldn't run into any troubles with burning your card out from overheating.