The front of the box
The ASUS HD5850 comes in a neatly packaged box that clearly depicts its features in a well laid out fashion. The box uses a subtle black and blue colour theme with a mythological graphic art to reflect the roaring performance of the actual card. Marketed as the TOP edition, the card is advertised as having a 10% overclock. In reality, the core is overclocked by 5.5% with the memory overclocked by 12.5%. The 10% may refer to the fact that the card is guaranteed to work at 800 MHz on the core. It can also be noted that the card uses a custom fan design, dubbed as DirectCU. We will have a closer look later of the cooler later on.
Turning to the back...
The back of the box is crammed with information about its features and specifications, translated in several languages for global appeal. These are centred around an illustration of the graphics card and its main selling points.
Closer look at the features
Taking a closer look at the back, we can see the design of the ASUS HD5850 with its DirectCU custom cooler and the additional voltage tweak feature which allows for much higher overclocking potential. According to ASUS the TOP edition cards are highly binned cores that are guaranteed to work at 800MHz despite the GPU being clocked at only 765Mhz. The cooler dubbed DirectCU, thanks to direct copper heat pipe contact with the core, claims 20% cooler operation when gaming and 35% quieter operation at idle than reference designs.
The interior packaging
Upon opening the box, we are greeted with another sleeker looking one with the gold ASUS emblem right in the middle.
The various compartments
The interior box uses several compartments to neatly bundle the graphics card and all the extra accessories. The top compartment is a standalone flat box that holds the manual and installation discs. Below is a foam enclosure where the graphics card can be found wrapped in an anti-static bag. Finally on the side is a box containing the extra cables and connectors.
The bundle
The whole bundle contains:
- the utility and driver discs
- the setup manual
- 1 x Molex to 6 pin PCIe power connector
- 1 x DVI to D-Sub adaptor
- 1 x HDMI to DVI adapter
- 1 x Crossfire cable
- the HD5850 graphics card
