Offering bags of gaming power for an attractive price, the GeForce 8600 series is an enticing prospect.
While Nvidia’s previous DirectX 10 efforts have been mostly impressive, both in terms of performance and physical size, they’ve also been on the pricey side. What we’ve all been waiting for is the launch of the rest of the GeForce 8-series cards and, in particular, the 8600. Nvidia has a talent for designing high-performance GPUs for cards costing $200 - $300 or so, as the six products on test prove. We’ll have to wait until next month to get real-world prices for its AMD/ATI competitor – the Radeon HD 2600 – but these cards are on sale now.
8600 GTS vs GT
Before delving into the tests and how well the six cards dealt with them, let’s briefly cover the theory behind the performance. Architecturally, there’s no difference between the GTS and the GT; any extra performance from the GTS comes from higher clock speeds. Both chips have 32 “stream processors” rather than the 128 or 96 of the two GeForce 8800 GPUs. Elsewhere, it’s much the same, with setup engines and thread-dispatch units all scaled down to be proportional to the reduced bank of stream processors.
While the stream processors of the GTS run at an impressive 1.45GHz (faster than even those of the 8800 GTS), the GT stream processors run at a more reasonable 1.19GHz. The “core” (as Nvidia describes those subunits surrounding the processing pipelines) runs at 675MHz on the GTS and a still rapid 540MHz on the GT. To round things off, the 256MB of RAM of the GTS runs at a lightning-quick 1GHz, dropping to 700MHz on the GT.
The cards
The Gigabyte GV-NX86T256D keeps to Nvidia’s script as far as clock speeds go, but ditches the active heatsink in favour of that stylish metal grille. And while you may feel tempted to skip to the GTS reviews, scores for this card are acceptably good, especially given the price. Using the settings outlined (below), we saw 29fps in Call of Duty 2 (CoD2), 42fps in Far Cry and 21fps in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Dropping the AA and AF boosted scores to an even healthier 35fps in CoD2 and 44fps in Oblivion. At $204, and with a copy of the excellent Supreme Commander, it’s an absolute bargain.
With the difference between GT and GTS being clock speed, the pre-overclocked XFX GeForce 8600 GT XXX Edition could be the bargain of the year. However, XFX charges a hefty premium for the overclock: the $239 gets you a “core” speed of 620MHz and a RAM speed of 800MHz. However, to really match the 8600 GTS you’d also have to overclock the stream processors, something that can only be done with a custom-written graphics-card BIOS, which no company managed for this test. The high price isn’t quite justified by the performance, though, with scores up from the Gigabyte by between 2fps and 5fps. The highlights were 33fps in CoD2 even with our 4x AA and 8x AF applied, while Oblivion ran at a super-smooth 49fps when we removed the AA and AF. However, you get next to nothing in the box; only one DVI-to-D-SUB converter and a 4-pin video cable to the two converters, 7-pin cable and recently released game from Gigabyte. This card ultimately fails to justify its price tag.
A good start from the 8600 GTS cards came from the ECS N8600GTS-256MX+. The box is neat and minimises waste, but contains nothing beyond the usual video cable and two DVI-to-D-SUB converters. Meanwhile, the card itself has received some factory-based overclocking, pushing the “core” to 720MHz and the RAM to 1.1GHz. We saw frame rate boosts of up to 2fps across all the tests, but it couldn’t match MSI’s package.
The PNY GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB DDR3 costs rather a lot considering isn’t pre-overclocked. You do get a copy of the enjoyable Splinter Cell: Double Agent and scores are high; 36fps in CoD2, 53fps in Far Cry and 24fps in Oblivion (which rockets to 53fps when AA and AF are lost) but, despite the $355 price, there are yet more enticing cards to buy.
These include the Asus EN8600GTS /G/HTDP/256M, which (as the heatsink implies) comes with a copy of the recently released Stalker, helping to justify the price of $355. The “/G” is important, as the other (Stalker-less) version of the card isn’t as attractive. Asus doesn’t tinker with the clock speeds, so scores are identical to the PNY above. If you were going to get Stalker anyway, stop reading now and order this card.
We just fancy the MSI NX8600GTS-T2D256E-HD-OC over the Asus, though. It too comes with a recently released game in the form of Company of Heroes, and is also pre-overclocked to the same levels as the ECS card. So, you get a good game, a smidgeon of extra performance and all for a very aggressive $320.
Settings: Far Cry: 1280 x 1024, very high detail settings, no AA or AF CoD2: 1280 x 1024, maximum detail settings, high texture settings, 4x AA, 8x AF Oblivion: 1280 x 1024, maximum detail settings, 4x AA, 8x AF
Test kit: 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6700; 1GB Corsair 800MHz DDR2 RAM; Intel 975XBX mother-board; 36GB Western Digital Raptor hard disk.
