More Info

Update

Software

With the fixed card in hand we had quite a different overclocking experience. The AOpen's overclocking utility was just wonderful. We're all familiar with the usual memory and core sliders, but AOpen had a great addition. AOpen added the ability to adjust voltage across and the core and memory! The GUI interface could be easier to use. The rotating knobs are a little annoying when you're trying to select an exact speed setting, but it's not a big issue. Other than that no complaints.

Utility 1

Utility 2

Update

Overclocking

Armed with these new utilities we got to work. We started out by increasing speeds until we encountered lockups and then proceeded to up the memory and core voltage to increase stability. Using this combination we got some very interesting results.

After upping the voltage, lockups became scarce. In their place we got the expected graphical artifacts along with massive slowdowns. At one point we had the card sitting at 380 MHz for the memory and the core at 250 MHz, but the frame rate dipped into the pathetic region. The card ended up at a respectable 242 MHz core and 375 MHz memory. One thing that was exceedingly hard to do was pinpoint exactly when a voltage increase was needed. Most of the time the culprit was heat. We're willing to say that the memory started feeling the pain around 360 and the core at about 235.

The numbers are all pretty much the same. If you've already seen them, you might want to skip ahead to the ballistics report.

Happenings

The following is a little story of what happened with this quirky little card.

The scene here was pretty grim. From experience with other cards our first attempt to overclock the card was by a 20 MHz increase. No dice, the card crashed and burned. Halving that amount we tried again, no luck. We tried the next few digits left to us. In the end we could not manage a 1 MHz overclock with the card. Using either the drivers provided with the card or with the 5.22 reference drivers. So no overclocking with the card we had. I doubt this is a common occurrence with a typical PA256Pro card. Just as we have CPUs that overclock by insane amounts there are always the occasional duds that go nowhere.

Ze front

Ze back

Overclocking

The previous is what happened before we opened our eyes. The AOpen card has a unique BIOS implementation that is used to overclock the video card. Initially, we were trying to overclock the PA256Pro card like every other NVIDIA card we have tested - in the video properties. This apparently didn't take too well with the AOpen card.

Unused to looking for anything at initial bootup, and we mean initial bootup, (as in right when it tells you what kind of video card you have) we hardly noticed that the AOpen video card had bios options we could actually change! When we did see it we found out that the card came overclocked by 10 MHz in the default setting! After double-checking, the default core setting was indeed running at 210 MHz while the memory was clocked at 350 MHz. With this newfound knowledge our overclocking efforts pushed the card up to a core speed of 225 MHz and the memory to 367 MHz. Not spectacular, but not too shabby either. The fan and heatsink on the card aren't very impressive; maybe with a replacement we could crank out a bit more power.

Ram

The Riser

Software

Included with the card are few tidbits to make the user happy. I guess the highlight of the package was Drakan. The second title is Rollcage, a pretty small game but it seems pretty cool. The last bit of software is WinDVD 2000. Not much to say about that one is there?

The drivers provided by AOpen utilize the 5.16 and 5.17 NVIDIA reference drivers. It didn't seem as though they did much other than change a few pictures. All the NVIDIA logos were replaced with AOpen logos. Some gray slider bars are now blue. Nothing special. The card also features thermal monitoring, but we never got it to work in Windows. The monitoring program mentioned some error about not being able to enable the hardware-monitoring chip.

Oddly enough the overclocking utility was also changed in color with the AOpen drivers. My question is why even leave this in if it doesn't work with the card, let alone modify it?