Sales of Small Form Factor (SFF) PCs show no sign of slowing down, with the originators of the concept, Shuttle, being joined in the marketplace by more and more players. While many OEMs offer pre-built SFF's in their product line-up, the majority are sold as barebone cases, where you get to choose the CPU, graphics card and so on.

The latest SFF systems use up-to-date Intel motherboards, which in turn means you have to find a suitable PCI-Express graphics card to use if you don't want to go with the integrated graphics solution. That's not a problem in a normal-size SFF case, but what about in a smaller format case? If half-height AGP cards are hard to find, imagine the problems trying to find a half-height PCI-E card. A stepping stone between a full-height card and a half-height card is AOpen's Aeolus PCX6600-DV128LP.

The clue is in the LP part of the name; the PCX6600-DV128LP is a low profile PCI-E card, with a smaller than normal PCB and a full-size back plate, the latter holding the standard VGA, DVI and TV-Out ports. But the real surprise of the card is the passive heatpipe cooling technology it uses, which also makes it suitable for any quiet PC application where out and out graphics performance isn't a must. The PCB sits between two large, aluminium heat sinks, which are joined together by a pair of heat pipes; if you think of Zalman's heatpipe graphics card coolers, you will get the idea.

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At the heart of the PCX6600-DV128LP is nVidia's GeForce 6600 (NV43) GPU, a graphics processing unit aimed squarely at the mainstream market with a core speed of 300MHz and just eight pixel pipelines, three vertex shaders and a 128-bit memory interface. The original 6600 used GDDR1 memory clocked at 350MHz (effective 700MHz) but for the PCX6600-DV128LP AOpen has used 2ns GDDRIII memory to give the card a bit more poke than standard.

Performance-wise the PCX6600-DV128LP won't set the world on fire, but that isn't the point of a card like this. Even so, it gave us a 3DMark05 score of 2350 when tested at a resolution of 1,024 by 768 pixels at 32-bit colour. Of more interest will be the 53.9fps score from Doom 3 and 40.8fps from Half Life 2. These games were tested at the 1,024 x 768 resolution but with all the details set to maximum; obviously if you want faster frame rates you can drop the resolution and reduce the detail level.

If you are building a barebones PC or a quiet PC, and don't need or want super fast graphics performance, then AOpen's PCX6600-DV128LP is definitely worth adding to your list, especially with its silent cooling system.