LOSTCIRCUITS

Sapphire's Bundle

To bundle or not to bundle is always an issue in the retail market. On one side, the bundle drives up the total cost, on the other side, especially in the high end sector, it would not come across too well with the customers if they purchased a graphics card only to find out that the DVI to VGA dongle was missing. The question here is where to draw the line. Different manufacturers have different strategies in the case of Sapphire, the bundle is somewhat skimpy but contains the essentials for use of the X1900XTX with TV and HDTV. SImilar to what we criticized in the past, the manual does not contain any documentation beyond the hookup schematics to a SCART interface (if anybody even remembers what SCART is), otherwise, it does not go beyond the legal requirements for documentation of how to insert a graphics card into the appropriate slot. By the end of the day, the user is left stranded with a cornucopia of cables and connectors and no information whatsoever how to use any of them. Well, there is always the web to get help but in all seriousness, the manual does need some severe overhaul.

   

Power DVD and Power Director, both courtesy of Cyberlink are ok to have but nothing to write home about, both applications appear to be the standard bundle with whatever current video card is out there. That doesn't mean that the software is useless, on the contrary, compared to some of the higher end versions for video editing like Adobe's Premere, at least the price is right.

In the past, Sapphire has often been criticized for their outdated and kind of stale game bundle and there is some validity to that. Arguably, the bundling of a DX7 game with a high end DX9 compliant graphics card is not really a turn-on. On the other hand, licenses to the latest and greatest games don't come for free, on the contrary, these things ARE expensive. Bundling of demo versions is certainly not a good way to go either, there is no worse turn-off than getting into a game to find out halfway towards the end that this is where it ends...

This kind of strategy was used by Diamond Multimedia some 8 years ago when they bundled a crippled version of Unreal (the original version) with the Monster Fusion and may have contributed to the fall of the then multimedia and graphics giant - people were feeling cheated.

Prince of Persia (The Warrior Within), Brothers In Arms (Road to Hill 30), Richard Burns Rally and Tony Hawk's Underground2 were included with the review sample, retail versions will have Pacman, Solitaire and Hearts... just kidding

Sapphire is going an entirely different way, the game CD included contains four "try and buy" games which means that there is a free downlaod for each game that is linked to a high-speed server and allows a trial period of e.g. 1 hour until the freebie expires. At this point, the game needs to be purchased or else an autorization code must be supplied. As far as we can tell, two of these codes (sorry, no photographs of those stickers) are supplied with each X1900 XT, regardless of whether it is the standard or the XTX version.

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