The video card race has rapidly become one of placing a market leader at virtually every price point. It's no longer enough to have the king of the performance block and then hope buyers beat a trail to your mid-range and entry-level options; a company has to provide the goods at each position. This was the strategy behind the Radeon 9600 Pro, and although it was less powerful than the Radeon 9500 Pro, ATI could produce inexpensively, and it still competed well at this level.
NVIDIA has their own challenger at the mid-range, encompassing the NV31-based GeForce FX 5600 Ultra and 5600 boards. These are designed to offer DirectX 9 functionality and performance to the mass market, and without the cooling and price issues that plagued the NV30-based GeForce FX 5800 Ultra. NVIDIA has since upgraded their performance line to the FX 5900 and 5900 Ultra, and now must depend on the older, GeForce FX 5600-based product to hold the line with mid-range buyers.
AOpen is a long-time NVIDIA partner, dating back to the TNT days, and are currently producing video cards at a wide range of performance and price points. The Aeolus FX5600S is an interesting entry, as it targets the same basic market as the standard Radeon 9600, and has the price and features to match. In this review, we'll be taking a close look at how performance stacks up against the ATI competition, as well as offering our take on image quality and overall value ratings.
The AOpen Aeolus FX5600S sports a very conventional design, including a dark PCB and the standard VGA, DVI-I and S-Video outputs. The nView feature is also supported through the dual-display outputs. The card features a silver, AOpen-branded heatsink-fan unit, and this model ships with 256-MB DDR standard. The cooling solution is more than adequate for heavy usage, and the GeForce FX 5600 cards are AGP 8X complaint and do not require any additional power requirements.
The Aeolus FX5600S is clocked at 325 MHz core and 500 MHz DDR memory clock speeds, but uses a lower 270 MHz core speed when in 2D mode. Our review card came with Hynix 3.6 ns DDR, which translates roughly into a 555 MHz DDR memory clock speed rating. As with all NVIDIA GeForce FX-based products, DirectX 9 support is standard, including Pixel and Vertex Shader 2.0.
The AOpen retail box follows the standard nature of the Aeolus FX5600S card itself, and is quite rudimentary in nature. Along with the GeForce FX 5600 card, you will also find a driver CD, a copy of InterVideo WinCinema, an S-Video to composite adapter, along with Quick Install and full hardcopy manuals. This is more than adequate for our needs, though an OEM game or two would have rounded out the package nicely.
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