Conclusion

Without doubt AOpen's Aeolus FX 5900 XT is one of the best GeForce XT models we have seen. It's performance not only meets the requirements of a GeForce XT card, but it managed to exceed the performance of the supposed better FX 5900 chipset.

In detail, Aeolus managed to outcome good frames per second in games making the average gamer satisfied. Of course the card is no match for ATI's top notch card we included in our comparison. It is worth noting though, that in some resolutions Aeolus was as good as ATI's 9800 Pro card.

The synthetic benchmark suite indicated some good scores for Aeolus showing that it is a card that should be taken into account. Unfortunately Aeolus didn't catch up with the FX 5900 in some benchmarks, but it's general performance in games covers that gap.

As for the graphics quality, it seems that the 5900 XT GPU renders the Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic-Filtering features in good levels offering satisfying qualitative gameplay.

Regarding it's overclocking capabilities, Aeolus showed quite surprising results. We managed to overclock it at 440MHz for it's core and 800MHz for it's memory. Especially the 800MHz memory speed achieved is really something to have in mind when comparing it with other XT models. It seems that the memory heatsinks do a good job maintaining the entire chipset cool. Even more the 440/800 overclocking resulted to a very good performance increase in the games we tested.

The lack of game bundle should be noted but unfortunately this is the strategy the majority of VGA card distributors follow. On the other hand this disadvantage leads to a very strong point of Aeolus 5900 XT - it's affordable price. Having a look at some online stores we found AOpen's Aeolus FX 5900 XT with less than 170 euro (about $200). Of course this is something to have in mind if you intend to purchase a decent VGA card at a logical cost.