Image Courtesy: Newegg

We’ve already introduced the 6600GT previously, so for now, we’ll skip the introduction and get straight to the actual product. Although it’s a minor thing in the grand scheme of features, the black PCB color and orange copper actually make this card attractive than standard versions we see from manufacturers these days. The heatsink and fan combination are a needed accessory to dissipate heat off of the modern GPUs. Not too impressively, the combo isn’t the quietest in the market. Even though we have seen slightly better cards noise wise, the difference between the loudest fans and the quietest ones isn’t all that much unless you are comparing a passively cooled heatsink to a bold design such as the ones from HIS. With that said, AOpen does offer something special that other companies tend to ignore on midrange adapters: RAMsinks. Throughout our testing, we’ve found the RAMsinks to be of little help in the overclocking department, but if the company can implement them without adding onto the cost, there’s nothing to complain about. The RAMsinks as well as the heatsink and fan combo performed rather well, as you’ll later find out in the evaluation.

The board layout of the card is fairly clean with everything lined up nicely. Unlike other heatsink and fan combinations, this particular design only requires a connection through the front side in order to stay intact. Similar to other 6600GT adapters, the AOpen edition offers eight pixel pipelines, 128MB of onboard memory and 128-bit memory interface with GDDR3 as the memory standard. The version we are looking at today is PCIe x16 with a single D-Sub, DVI and TV-Out ports.

As part of the package, the driver CD, manual, quick guide and the rest of the necessities are packed as well. However, what had us exciting were the actual games: Prince of Persia and Demo CD. Unfortunately, the demos are very outdated, but Prince of Persia is still a pretty solid title, though not recent in any regard. It has come to the point where we must commend AOpen for including something that other manufactures usually skip over.

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