As the name suggests, the AOpen Aeolus 6200 uses the GeForce 6200 GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) which is the budget chip in the Nvidia family. The 6200 is a cut-down version of the GeForce 6600, so it has four pixel pipelines, rather than eight, so even though the 6200 and 6600 share the same core speed of 300MHz the 6200 is guaranteed to have relatively low performance.

With its previous budget chip, the FX5200, Nvidia further hobbled performance by removing some of the features which allowed the chip to compress image data efficiently, which meant that the FX5200 took a larger performance hit when you enabled image quality features such as FSAA (Full Scene Anti Aliasing) and AF (Anisotropic Filtering), compared to the FX5700.

Nvidia hasn't gone down this route with the 6200, perhaps because it has realised that the chip simply doesn't have the performance to run a high resolution above 1,024x768, and neither can it manage to run with FSAA or AF enabled in intensive 3D work. This is almost a truism with budget chips because, let's face it, if you can play Doom 3 on High Quality settings with a budget graphics card, you won't need to spend the extra cash on a mid-range or high-end card.

You generally expect to find 128MB of memory on a budget or mid-range graphics card, but AOpen decided to install 256MB of memory on the Aeolus 6200 which adds about £20 to the asking price, so it costs only £6 less than the Leadtek PX6600TD, yet the performance is significantly lower.

The extra memory means that the AOpen is able to complete all of our 3DMark05 tests, including the intensive run at 1,600x1,200 with FSAA and AF enabled, but the score is so low that it only serves to show how unusable a GeForce 6200 is at these settings.

When we ran the Nvidia Coolbits registry update we were able to use Nvidia's Forceware drivers to overclock the Aeolus by an impressive amount. The core speed rose from 300MHz to 370MHz while the memory speed went from 665MHz to an astonishing 965MHz, and as a result we saw our benchmark results rise by up to 40 percent.

This huge increase doesn't change the fact that the scores are still low compared to a mid-range graphics card, yet the AOpen is rather expensive for what it delivers.