Texas Gaming Festival - 1000 Seat LAN April 22-24

The Card

I have here my last 6600 GT to review; at least for now. This is an AOpen Aeolus 6600 GT. Like the 10 other 6600 GT's that have passed through my PCI-E test box, this one is also based on the reference 6600 GT. Aeolus stands for... Absolute,Extreme, Optimize, Luxury, Ultimate, and Satisfied.

This 6600 GT just like all the others has 128 MB's of DDR III memory, and the NV43 GPU. This card also features a maximum resolution of 2048 X 1536 at 85Hz. The NV43 GPU provides 8 pixel pipelines, and 128 bit graphics core. Basically a reference 6600 GT with a different color PCB and fancy looking HSF.

When I did my over clocking on this card I was surprised to see that it didn't want to over clock to 580MHz. The highest I was able to over clock the GPU was a blazing 564MHZ. All of the 10 other 6600 GT's that have been through my PCI-E test box have over clocked to 580MHz with out any problem. Most likely the video card isn't being cooled properly. It could be that the AOpen 6600 GT's have a much lower yield than the others, but I doubt that is the case. Upon closer inspection of the heat sink, I found that AOpen chose to use very low quality heat sink paste that allowed the HSF to move, wobble, and do a dance with very little force. So I wiped off the white crap and dabbed on some of that fancy Arctic Silver 5. After applying the AS5, the card over clocked to 581MHz but no further due to the quality of the HSF. I believe a much higher clock speed could be obtained with an after market cooler.

As you can clearly see the top picture is the card itself. The bottom left picture is the bundle and the picture to the right is the box. In the bundle you will receive a full version of ARX Fatalis, and Spell Force. You will also receive a games collection, a driver cd, the standard cables, and a manual. You can get All of this for around$200.

The System

My test system will be based on an AsusA8N-SLI Deluxe with the nForce 4 Chipset.. I will be using anAthlon 64 3800+, 1 gigabyte ofCorsair XMS memory, anH.E.C. Power OP 475 power supply, and aWD800 7200rpm IDE hard drive. On the external I am using theTsunami Thermaltake.