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The AOpen is a little pricier than the average 6800 card but it also has a few tricks up its sleeve. It employs a 7cm low noise fan and unlike the Zalman on the Sapphire, it’s a single slot solution. This means that you’ll be able to fit it into any PCI Express compatible small form factor (SFF) machine, whereas you’ll be only able to fit the Zalman cooler equipped Sapphire into a few select SFF machines that have room to spare.

The AOpen also features what AOpen has dubbed an 'Iron Spine’. As you can see from the pictures this is a piece of metal that runs along the top of the PCB. AOpen claims that this is “to prevent the PCB bending from heat generated by the high performance GPU”. We’ve not really had any problem with bent PCBs on a graphics card before but we’re fairly certain that with this spine in place it won’t be problem with this card. It did at least make it easier to push down into the PCI Express slot.

The other feature on the AOpen is that small connector at the top that indicates that the card is SLI ready. Unfortunately for nVidia, this isn’t the huge selling point it was a few months ago. Firstly, the X800 XL card will be compatible with forthcoming CrossFire cards, so while the technology hasn’t appeared yet, it’s still enough to give pause for thought. Secondly, and this is a big one, the release of nVidia’s own 7800 GTX has essentially blown the upgrade path for all current SLI compatible cards out of the water. Considering that a single 7800 GTX is faster than a pair of 6800 Ultra’s in SLI, there’s no way anyone would buy a plain GeForce 6800 with SLI in mind. A pair of even the cheapest 6800s would cost about the same as as single 7800 GTX, which would be so much faster than a pari of 6800 vanillas it would be scary.

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