AOpen is better known for its motherboard business (an area which seems to be largely dominated by far-eastern countries whose names begin with the letter 'A') than for graphics cards. However, there are increasing moves by these companies to expand their business from OEM into the retail sector, and AOpen's latest offering in this respect is the PA256 Deluxe II.

This card is based on the GeForce 2 Pro graphics controller which, in Nvidia's performance league table, would sit somewhere between the standard GeForce 2 and the GeForce 2 Ultra. Perhaps not surprisingly, that's about where we found this card to lie in our performance test results, with the card's 32MB of DDR memory helping it to a respectable score in most tests.

The PA256 Deluxe II has an S-video TV output port on its back plate, which is bolted into place and looks a bit 'Heath Robinson', to say the least. However, this design is no different to most of the GeForce 3 cards on the market which have similar modules, in accordance with Nvidia's reference design. Naturally, underneath this module is the card's D-sub VGA output for conventional monitors.

The Nvidia chip incorporates Transform & Lighting functions as well as voltage and clock adjustment for those who like to tweak, and drivers are supplied for most flavours of Windows, plus Linux and even OS/2. Top resolution is 2048 x 1536 in 32-bit colour depth, so it won't have problems filling even the largest of monitors.

Very few of the today's graphics cards come with decent printed manuals, with the manufacturers preferring to save costs (and perhaps trees) by putting all documentation on CD. AOpen is one of the exceptions, providing a good quality, detailed paper manual that covers pretty much all you need to know. A driver CD including over-clocking tools, a copy of WinDVD (for DVD playback) and an S-video to composite adapter complete the AOpen bundle.

Verdict
Yet another example of Nvidia's increasing dominance of the graphics chip market, this AOpen card turned in a good performance and will more than suffice for all but the most dedicated 3D games fanatic.

Company: Aopen

Contact: 0800 435978

Tags: geforce nvidia geforce 2 series hardware components intel core i7 advanced micro devices video card