Introduction

Mention AOpen products to a typical DIY hardware enthusiast and optical drives, barebones systems, motherboards are the more likely responses that you would get. Despite its experience with NVIDIA graphics cards and having manufactured quite a number of GeForce cards, AOpen has not been well known for its graphics cards lineup, mostly owing to its low-key profile. In this very competitive market, where flashy packages talk loud than boring specifications, AOpen's retail presence has been underwhelming. The simple restrained design of its graphics card packaging and its relatively small box size may have contributed to this image. Also, it may not help that its range of graphics cards has been confined to NVIDIA products though that probably has its own benefits in terms of getting attractive product prices and stocks from NVIDIA.

So it may come as a surprise that hot on the heels of the AOpen Aeolus GeForce 7800 GTX card that we have just reviewed, we now have another AOpen graphics card for your reading pleasure. This time, AOpen is targeting the budget conscious with a card based on NVIDIA's lower middle range GeForce 6600 chipset. Equipped with a heat pipe based cooler and a low card profile, the AOpen Aeolus PCX6600-DV128LP has some unique characteristics that should prove to be quite interesting. First, let's review the technical specifications:

AOpen's purely heat pipe only GeForce 6600 - the Aeolus PCX6600-DV128LP.