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The Bundle

A criticism that we had of video cards lately are the included bundles. No one wants to play a 3 year old game that would run fine on a 3 year old video card. ATI upped the gauntlet with the inclusion of a Half-Life 2 coupon with nearly their entire 9600/9800 lineup and Nvidia answered back recently with their Call of Duty pack-in promotion for the 5900 series of cards. Gigabyte not only includes the Half-Life 2 coupon with the R96XT but also Tomb Raider - Angel of Darkness, Rainbow Six 3 - Raven Shield, and Will Rock. *edit It has been brought to our attention that Gigabyte will NOT include Half-Life 2 with the 9600 series of cards but only the 9800 XT even though the front of the box explicitly states that it does indeed include Half-Life 2. We will be following up on this situation. On the applications side they bundle a copy of Cyberlink's PowerDVD 5. Tomb Raider has been part of our benchmark suite for a while now and is a pretty game to show off if nothing else. Raven Shield is another quality game from the talented folk over at Ubisoft. One of my big beefs with Rogue Spear and the original Rainbow Six were how bad they looked compared to other shooters of the time. Thankfully Redstorm has dropped the in-house engine and gone with the Unreal engine instead and it looks light years better than the previous incarnations of Rainbow Six. Will Rock is this year's equivalent of Serious Sam. Nothing to write home about here unfortunately.

Something that is kind of neat is the cable that Gigabyte provided- instead of the cheesy RCA->SVideo converter they have included a cable that does both. Also included in the box is a DVI adapter for those who want to get a little dual monitor action without having to buy a LCD with a DVI port.

A nice addition is Gigabyte's V-Tune, an overclocking utility for the 9600 XT. No longer does the end user have to dig around the internet for an overclocking utility. This feature is commendable but on the other side hand, the implementation needs to be better. The focus of GUI design needs to move over from novelty/art to functionality for these type of utilities. Radclocker was nice because it was simple and integrated within the rest of the control panel for the ATI driver properties. V-Tune kind of just sits there with a non standard GUI. The sliders are a bit hard to manipulate and they do not capture mouse focus well. Several times I had my mouse right on the slider and attempts to drag the slider were unsuccessful. Gigabyte's tray icon utility also doubles a lot of functionality already present in the ATI task tray applet.

Now available in Grape flavor

No more icons in the taskbar please. Replace ATi's or something :(