AOpen Aeolus FX 5900 XT review - Page 1 - A Godly Introduction

Product: AOpen Aeolus GeForce FX 5900 XT
Manufacturer: AOpen
MSRP: € 220

It surely has been a while since we have reviewed anything from AOpen, nevertheless today we will do just that. Known for their good reputation in mainboards and graphics cards a year or two ago AOpen started the Aeolus trademark for their NVIDIA based graphics card products. For those of you who do not know what Aeolus means .. here we go:

Main Entry: Ae.o.lus
Pronunciation: 'E-&-l&s
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin, from Greek Aiolos: the Greek god of the winds

It's funny how graphics' card manufacturers are always relating to Greek gods and mystic titles. Let's see if you recognize a few:  Prophet (Hercules), Maya (Gigabyte), Atlantis (Sapphire), Medusa (Albatron), Excalibur (HiS) and thus the Greek god of the winds, Aeolus. Quite funny actually because of you look at the cooling solution of today's tested product I'm sure it'll cause some wind, it's huge.

The product we will review today is the new NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 XT. I say new because it's fresh in the Quarter 4 lineup from NVIDIA. BTW NVIDIA, copycatting is not really a nice thing, the XT obviously has been chosen to compete with the Radeon 9x00 XT series of graphics cards.

When I first heard of the new XT series I figured it only would be fun marketing yet what I did not expect at that time was a product of this caliber in the price range. I'm surprised by this product as it in direct competition with the FX 5700 (Ultra). Performance wise this product will be quite a bit faster then the 5700 series yet only 20 buck more expensive. What makes this product so dominant over the 5700 is due to two reasons: First of all it has 4 pixel pipelines with 2 TMUs per pipe compared to 4x1 on the 5700. Next to that it is armed with 128 MB running over a fantastic 256-bit memory interface which guarantees high computational bandwidth for it's frame buffer.

Basically this is a somewhat slowed down GeForce FX 5900/5950 Ultra, NVIDIA's current flagship. The differences can be found on core and memory clockspeed and the result means value.

The GeForce FX 5900 produced around a GPU that is profiled as Cinematic GPU as it is capable of bringing cinematic visual effects on your PC with the combination of some brutal power and an excellent feature set. The CineFX GPU is of course capable of utilizing DirectX 9 Pixel Shaders 2.0+, Vertex Shader 2.0+ and OpenGL. Basically this product is in the high-end range and offers with its 4 pixel pipelines x 2 TMUs per pipe a lot of gaming pleasure.

In today's article I'll present you an overview of the 5900 XT with the help of a nice photo shoot, overview of the ForceWare drivers ,and then of course we'll dig into our benchmark suite where we have tested the card in both RAW and quality setting 8x Anisotropic filtering + Anti aliasing at four levels. We are going to compare the new cards with almost all other GeForce FX cards, and we'll throw in a couple of popular Radeon 9x00 cards as well.