Page 3 - inside the Box and Installation

UltraShadow TechnologyOne of the newer features that became available with the release of the NV35 series was UltraShadow technology. Basically it can now render more accurate shadows by maintaining the interactions of various lights sources and 3D objects while remaining efficient and thus gives good performance. The more passes that are required for the lighting and shadow calculations for example, scenes that involve multiple light sources and many physical objects in sight the more significant the performance improvement, with the most complex scenes achieving the most noticeable results.

UltraShadow enables a Higher Quality somewhat cinematic experience in games. Games like the Upcoming Doom III will use it.

What's in the box
A trend nowadays that I notice a lot is that we see less and less software in the box. It makes sense as manufacturers try to sell the the more expensive line-up as cheap as possible. Including software and anything additional costs money and thus raises the price. Creative Labs Europe is following that trend as they are trying to bring this product to the European market for the best possible/acceptable price.

We see a driver CD and the game GunMetal. Furthermore we'll see a quick installation guide and a power supply connector cable (Molex). That's it my friends. What i'm tring to say here is this, the Geforce FX 5900 Ultra already is a very expensive product, Creative likely did the right thing here. Keep it simple as it's all about the product and cut additional costs.

You can click on any photo to enlarge it towards 1024x768 high-resolution

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. Insert the graphics card, boot up windows, run the driver installation, then restart and you are set to go.

The first thing I noticed when I powered up the test-system was the fact that the cooling fan was much more quiet compared to the reference model. I mean, the reference model already was very acceptable compared towards the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, this one is just down right silent which is very nice to see (hear).

Let's go look at some photo's shall we ..