The full retail package will land you one each; ATI X1600XT  video card, DVI adapter, S-video cable, a paper Getting Started guide and an application/driver CD. Some may consider this kind of thin considering that the X1600 is under ATI's "GAMER CARD" section. Me personally, it's not all bad really - some people never even bother to take the driver CD out of its wrapper, let alone use anything on it. To me, the drivers themselves are a non-issue because it should be a common practice to go straight to the GPU manufacturer's website and download the latest set of reference drivers, which at the time of this review are the Catalyst 6.4. Those drivers will also be used for all phases of testing. For mention, the drivers on the CD will support Windows 98, ME, 2000, and of course Windows XP. For those folks running the Windows Vista beta, you'll have to get your drivers direct from the ATI website. Honorable mention goes to the Video editing software which is also available on the bundled CD; Tachomi 3D Edit Silver - full edition. While the card is certainly capable of game play, Connect3D elected to bundle software that would be useful, but keep the price down on the whole retail package. Besides, most of the time, games we get bundled with video cards are games we (usually) already have in our collection.

     Reference design is the name of the game here. This is mostly because ATI hasn't really given its vendor's much room to play with the cards, until lately. ATI has recently made pacts with most of its big-name dealers to allow overclocking and other performance tweaks. This is all with an understanding that Return Merchandise Authorization issues will be handled exclusively by the companies that made the video card, not ATI has a parent company. So expect to start seeing a lot more radical design shifts, especially to their X1000 series cards - very very soon.

     Until then, we're going to be seeing this style cooler, which started back with ATI's (then top of the line video card) 9800XT. The only reach change has been the coolers size, to accommodate the higher GPU heat.

     Held on by four screws, the stock cooler can be removed very easily to be changed out very easily.