- X800 Pro
- Spell Force
- Rainbow Six 3 Raven Shield
- Power DVD 5.0
- DVI to D-Sub adapter
- TV Out Cable
- Video In cable
- 3D-Album
The X800 Bundle for hardware is fairly impressive. You get the card, a DVI to D-Sub adapter (to convert the DVI connector to work with a VGA monitor), a TV Out cable to use the TV Out on the cad and a Video In cable to get video off a video source. It would have been nice to have seen Gigabyte include a 2nd DVI-I connector and another DVI to D-Sub adapter to allow the owner to install dual DVI LCD monitors, but this card doesn't.
The software bundle is rather mediocre in my opinion. Gigabyte's bundle for their last 5950 Ultra card is far better. Last year on their 5900XT you got Arx Fatalis, Call Of Duty (which I enjoyed a lot), Tomb Raider Angel Of Darkness and Rainbow Six 3. This card came with Spell Force and Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield. Anyway Spellforce is relatively new but Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield is relatively an ancient game. Power DVD 5.0 is the latest version of a popular DVD program. If you don't have a DVD player for your PC it's time to get with the times as there are decent DVD Rewritable drives for under $100 like the AOpen 8X DRW8110. 3D-Album allows you to create vivid 3D animated albums with your own digital Photos. I don't see much use for this program but it is included.
ATI has recently released new drivers Catalyst 4.6. My buddy, Terry Makedon is part of the reason ATI has turned around as he pushed for driver quality, stability and a constant schedule of 12 WHQL drivers a year. This is a huge step from the 4 quarterly drivers ATI used to release. The quality of the drivers has markedly improved as well since Terry has joined ATI.
I've included some screenshots of the ATI Catalyst 4.6 drivers. I feel ATI's interface for changing the settings of the video card are very intuitive. To change the AA and AF settings, simply right click the desktop go to properties and the advanced tab. At this point simply click advanced and then the 3d tab. There are 5 presets for the drivers, Optimal Performance (which sets the Texture Preference and Mipmap Level to the Performance setting), High Performance (which sets the TP and ML to the Quality setting), Balanced (which sets the TP and ML to High Quality), High Quality (which sets the Antialiasing to 2x and the Anisotropic Filtering to 8X level, and finally Optimal Quality (which sets the AA to 4x and the AF to 16x). To change the performance of the card manually one simply clicks the Custom button which allows you to change the settings to your liking.
