The Bundle
What's in the box? Of course the PCI-Express version of the graphics card. Not a lot of stuff can be expected in there when we talk about software though. On the hardware side, things look much better. Included are:
- Arx Fatalis full game
- Demo game pack
- HDTV & S-Video Output cable (RCA 3-way component)
- DVI to VGA Adaptor (1x)
- S-Video cable
- Composite cable
- Manual
You will also receive a driver CD, that's about it though.
Excuse Me, but Watt Did You Say?
With an on-going trend in increased power consumption we will check exactly that, power consumption of the PC. We simply look at the peak Wattage during a 3DMark05 session to verify power consumption.
The graphics card consumes less than 60 Watts at peak during 3D gaming, this is also the reason why we do not see a 6-pin power connector on the card. Your PCI-Express 16x bus can feed a maximum 75 Watts to a graphics card, which obviously is sufficient for this model.
We do what we always do with new graphics cards and that is monitoring the overall wattage peak with the help of a wattage meter. Slight side note, you are looking at the overall usage of the PC. The meter is placed between the power connector and the PSU.
In 3DMark the PC shows a maximum peak use of ~214/216 Watt. Very nice considering the test system was using an Athlon 64 4000+ CPU armed with 1 GB memory, one optical and one HD drive. Remember that's a peak, not average consumption, which is way lower.
The Installation
It's really not hard to install a graphics card yourself nowadays. Especially with brands like ATI and NVIDIA who use unified driver sets. If you have a really new product then make sure you have the latest drivers on your HD. First uninstall your current graphics card's drivers carefully, this is very important especially if the older graphics card was from a different chipset manufacturer. Now power down the PC and pull out the power cable. Insert the graphics card in the slot, secure it with a screw, connect the monitor and boot up windows, run the driver installation, then restart and you are set to go. That's all. Also important, make sure you have the latest version of DirectX installed.
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