AOpen Aeolus FX 5900 XT

Review Pages

1. Introduction
2. Test Specifications
3. 3DMark 2003
4. Aquamark 3
5. Codecreatures
6. GLExcess
7. Farcry & Painkiller
8. Unreal Tournament 2004 & 2003
9. Halo & Tomb Raider:AOD
10. Anti-Aliasing Quality
11. Anisotropic Filtering Quality
12. Overclocking Capabilities
13. Conclusion

AOpen Aeolus FX 5900 XT

AOpen is known for it's great variety of products including DVD/CD Drives, Bare bone systems, servers, motherboards, Graphics cards and other hardware. As a supporter of Nvidia, AOpen has released many VGA cards wearing Nvidia's GPUs. You can have a look of AOpen's VGA series here.

On this review you will be able to read about AOpen's Aeolus FX 5900 XT card equipped with 128 MB of DDR with a 256-bit memory architecture. Also a new section about Anti-Aliasing and Anisotroping-Filtering quality features has been established. Read on...

- Specifications

GPU	GEFORCE FX 5900 XT (NV 35)
Memory Bus Width	128MB DDR MEMORY
Memory interface	256 Bit DDR
Memory Type	BGA DDR
Core Clock	390 MHz
Memory Clock	700 Mhz (2x350)
Memory Bandwidth	22.4 GB/sec
Pixel Fill Rate	3.2 Gpixels/sec
Geometry rate	300 Mtriangles/sec
Bus	8x/4x/2x AGP
Processing technology	0.13µ
Output Connections	VGA + TV + DVI
Cooling	single-slot Fan sink
2D Display Resolutions & Hz	640x480@240, 800x600@240, 1024x768@200, 1152x864@170, 1280x1024@150, 1600x1200@100, 1920x1440@85, 2048x1536@85
3D Maximum resolution	2048x1536 with 16.7M colors
Anisotropic Filtering modes (AF)	2x/2xQ/4x/6xS/8x
Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) modes	2x/4x/6x/8x
Dual Display	Supported
Pipelines	4
Texture units per pixel pipeline	2
Technologies supported	- Intellisample HCT is a new compression scheme for better compression at high resolutions with Anti-Aliasing. - UltraShadow Technology enables a Higher Quality and cinematic experience in games - CineFX 2.0 doubles the performance of floating-point pixel shader operations. - LMA II contains a loss less form of Z-compression, saving memory bandwidth for higher performance.
Pixel Shader Support	2.0+
Vertex Shader Support	2.0+
DTV/HDTV decoding	Supported
System requirements	The minimum system requirements for the card and complementary software: - PC with Pentium 4 / III 450 MHz or AMD Athlon processor with AGP 4x/8x universal slot -128MB of system memory and 1.6 GB of hard disk space -8x speed CD-ROM drive, DVD playback requires DVD drive -300-Watt power supply or greater - Windows 2000, 98SE, ME, XP and DirectX 9.0 - Microsoft DirectX 3.0 compatible sound card - Monitor supported: CRT-15 pin, Svideo, Composite and DVI-I (LCD)

As we have refer in previous reviews, Nvidia's FX XT series are lighter than the plain FXs. For example the GeForce FX 5900 model has 400Mhz core and 850Mhz memory clock, while the Geforce FX 5900 XT has 390 and 700 for its core and memory respectively.

- 3D Mark detailed specifications

As you can see from the 3DMark details we used the 56.72 Forceware drivers for the benchmark process. The 700/300 MHz referred it's the performance of the card regarding 2D environments (e.g. desktop).

- The chipset

The front side with a fan that looks promising.

The fan has 2 extensions that are used as heat sinks for the memory DDR's. In the overclocking capabilities page you will be able to see what AOpen's cooling solution can really do.

The front side without the cooling system

A closer look of the 5900 XT GPU

Hynix memory DDRs on board

and the back side

The standard VGA, S-Video, and DVI connections with TV-Out functionality.

- Package Contents

As fanatic gamers we could not hide our disappointment when opening the box. There was no game bundle and not a even a coupon for downloading Doom3 (do we ask much?). Some time ago VGA card distributors used to include at least 2 games in their product, but it seems that today they prefer to sacrifice the software bundle to the altar of the low cost.

Instead we found a driver CD with additional technology demos and InterVideo WinCinema playback software. The usual DVI->CRT, SVideo connectors and cable are also included.