When you open up the box you'll run into a plethora of gadgets. Of course next to the videocard itself we notice a dandy remote control, (no batteries though) a remote control receiver unit that plugs into your USB port, manuals and a really handy input adapter. The input adapter is a story on it's own, you hook it up to the videocard and instantly you will have added connectivity in the form of composite, SVHS and SPDIF in and outputs. Also a FireWire connector is available of course for usage with DV camera's.

the input adapter

input adapter connected to the videocard

Included software is of course ATI's driver CD with MultiMedia Playcenter and a full version of the Ulead VideoStudio in which you can do some very decent video editing (consumer level though).

In the next pages we will explain some of the nice features like movie playback and recording and of course will also run a set of benchmarks to see where exactly this videocard is performance wise. One thing is for sure, this is an awesome videocard and can be considered the Swiss knife of consumer graphics ..

from left to right, antenna/cable, DVI, input adapter, firewire

When you take a look at the board then you'll immediately notice one thing, it's build by ATI, not Hercules and most definitely not a 3d party manufacturer or subcontractor for Hercules. This means, no nifty blue orb cooling fan, no cool blue PCB which was the signature for Hercules Graphics cards and and no blue ramsinks tat Hercules/Guillemot was the first to introduce. Thus: a little less interesting graphics card for the tweakers/overclockers among us.

Newer products do have the Hercules/Guillemot in-house style though.