Sapphire Radeon HD4850 512MB Graphics Card Review

USB Software & Ruby ROM

As we have already mentioned, with the Sapphire HD4850 you get both a USB flash drive sampler and a CD with Ruby’s name all over it. As far as we can tell, both of these are a Sapphire exclusive so let’s see what we get in addition to the extremely complete accessory package.


USB Sampler Software


When you install the flash drive, a Flash menu will immediately pop up which gives you a number of options. All in all, there really isn’t much here other than a few tech demos, a link to Sapphire’s website and a number of wallpapers. The wallpapers aren’t that bad but they are something only a proud owner of a Sapphire GPU would use on a regular basis.


There really isn’t much here that will interest people, the files take up about 400MB on the drive so you can either delete them for a blank 2GB flash drive of move them to a separate folder for future use. Even if there isn’t anything on this drive that blows us away, it is still a free 2GB flash drive that can be put to a literally infinite number of uses.


Ruby ROM


Now we have come to the meat of the software section with the aptly-named Ruby ROM which is chalk full of extras. When the menu opens there are a number of selections we can make; Games, Applications, Screensaver or Wallpaper. Let’s see what the Games and Applications sections holds for us.


In terms of games there are demos of the western FPS Call of Juarez, the free-to-download MMORPG called Dungeon Runners and finally a demo of John Woo’s Stranglehold. Of all these demos, I actually enjoyed playing Stranglehold since even in this shortened form, it is wonderfully addictive. Unfortunately, there aren’t any full games included but we would rather have demos included than some b-list game we would never play.

Applications-wise things are pretty barren with an included interactive screensaver called Earthsim and the nifty Gameshadow service. If you have never heard of it, Gameshadow is a free application which you can set up to keep all your games up to date with patches and hotfixes. It is a lot easier than searching aimlessly for a site which carries the patch you are trying to find and then finding a server that will give you proper download speeds so believe it or not, this is a service I set up on all my test systems.


The final two sections include a single Stranglehold screensaver and number of ATI wallpapers. The screensaver is pretty cool but other than that there really isn’t anything which will catch your attention here.

All in all, the variety of software choices is pretty good and the inclusion of a couple of game demos should keep you busy for a good amount of time. It is interesting to see a company like Sapphire who is usually known for their frugal packaging schemes to include such a complete software package but I guess that stranger things have happened.