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For this assortment of cards, in the end, it's really just going tocome down to what you want, and how much you are willing to spend toget it. If you are looking for a relatively inexpensive, solid upgradesolution, you can't go wrong with the XFX 8600 GT. If you budgeted tospend another $40 or $50 dollars or so, then the MSI NX8600GTS willdeliver good performance for a reasonable price. If you want even morepower -- well, it depends how much you want to spend. The performanceoffered by the 8600 GTS family does seem a little underwhelming -- sothis might be a great excuse to set your sights a bit higher, and gofor another option; or, maybe to wait a little bit longer, to see whatkind of power the ATI HD 2600 XT can offer.
At the heart of the 8600 GT/GTS class card is the recently releasedG84 core. The G84 is a slimmed down version of the blazing-fastflagship G80 GPU core, which is (as of mid-June) still the biggestcommercial GPU on the market, with a transistor count of over 680million. The G84 came out in April, primarily to address an upcomingneed for Vista-ready, performance-class cards able to handle soon to bereleased DirectX 10 games. While the G80/8800 series GPU's are aimedmore towards the hardcore gamer crowd who will only settle for peakperformance, the G84 family aims to strike a balance betweenperformance and an affordable price ($125-$225).
Previously, in our April review of the XFX 8600 GT XXX,the 8600 GT was shown to be a solid upgrade choice for someone with anaging, under-performing GPU. Benchmarks indicated that the XFX 8600 GTXXX vastly outperformed 6600 GT class cards, while offering only slightperformance gains over 7600 GT cards. However, if you consider that the8600's all utilize the new unified shader model, and with PureVideo HD(for optimized Blu-Ray and HD DVD playback), as having CoverageSampling Antialiasing technology (which reduces the processing strainof AA on your GPU), then going the 8600 GT/GTS route makes a lot ofsense. Especially when you can find 8600 GT's retailing for only 10 or20 dollars more than the 7600 GT's. But what 8600 GT/GTS should you chose? Well, that's what we aregoing to try to help you decide. The good news is that you have noshortage of options. The competitors we have selected for thisroundup, in alphabetical order are: the Asus EN8600 GTS, the AsusEN8600 GTS TOP, the Gigabyte 8600 GT, the Gigabyte 8600 GTS OC, MSI'sNX8600 GTS, the XFX 8600 GT, and the XFX 8600 GTS.
As you are probably aware, this chart doesn't really tell the wholestory. All these cards are playing in the same league, so, whenconsidering one edition over the other, you will probably want to lookat other factors beyond clock speeds -- such as the bundled software,price, and cooling options for example -- in order to better help youmake the right choice. Without further delay, let's see what these 8600 GT/GTS's can do, and see if any particular card can steal the show... http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/8600_roundup
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