It's hard for us to be sure exactly what other people received when they got their OCZ Titan 3 cards. While we were initially told we would be receiving the final retail version of the card, we apparently ended up getting an earlier evaluation version that shipped without a driver disc and with only scant instructions.

The installation manual, for example, was a little 19 page guide that has basic, generic instructions for installing a GeForce3 video card. This guide is all in text without illustrations, which is not unusual for video card manuals; but does come off as being user-unfriendly. And while the guide refers to the company by name, on occasion, it seems not to have been written specifically for this card, as it makes no mention at all of the fact that the card's Blue Orb HSF needs to be connected to your system's power connectors.

Now obviously more advanced users are going to pop open the box and install the card without ever looking at the guide. So if OCZ Technologies just wants to serve that niche audience, they're fine. But if they're looking to also sell to intermediate users who are comfortable popping open their cases to install a card, but need some hold-handing in the form of a manual, then they need to step up efforts to make things a little easier on such consumers.

Moving past the instruction manual, not a whole heck of a lot was in the box we received. The box contained a 6-foot S-Video cable, the manual, the power adapter cable for the Blue Orb, and the card itself. The retail version also ships with a copy of PowerDVD, a standard for DVD playback. But comes with no demos nor full games, so this is really meant for someone looking for a nice, fast card without any need for bells and whistles.

As with most other GeForce3 cards, the OCZ Titan 3 has output connectors for VGA, DVI, and S-Video. Our card did not come with an S-Video-to-A/V adapter that will be needed by those who want to use TV-out, but don't have S-Video input on their televisions; but those little adapter dongles that most GeForce3 video cards still require the separate purchase of cabling, regardless, so this didn't bother us in the least. But what about the features that actually affect the gaming experience... how do they differ from other GeForce3's? As you take the card out of the box, you will immediately notice that the OCZ Titan 3 does not use the standard HSF nor the dual-memory heatsinks you would find on most GeForce3's. Rather, the folks at OCZ have stocked the card with a Blue Orb GPU cooler and copper heatsinks for the memory. The use of the Blue Orb, furthermore, also means you have to connect the card to your system's power supply, using the included connection cable.

The presence of a Blue Orb, of course, means you have a nice, easily overclockable video card in the OCZ Titan 3. Unlike other GeForce3's, that typically ship clocked at 200/460, as per the reference NVIDIA design, the Titan 3 comes with a core clock speed of 215MHz and with its 64MB DDR memory clocked at 515MHz. But as you will have guessed by the cooling on this card, we were able to go well beyond that, as well.