Related Articles

Today we are going to compare some of NVIDIA's latest in their mid-range offerings: the 8600 GT/GTS family of video cards.

At the heart of the 8600 GT/GTS class card is the recently released G84 core. The G84 is a slimmed down version of the blazing-fast flagship G80 GPU core, which is (as of mid-June) still the biggest commercial GPU on the market, with a transistor count of over 680 million. The G84 came out in April, primarily to address an upcoming need for Vista-ready, performance-class cards able to handle soon to be released DirectX 10 games. While the G80/8800 series GPU's are aimed more towards the hardcore gamer crowd who will only settle for peak performance, the G84 family aims to strike a balance between performance 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 an aging, under-performing GPU. Benchmarks indicated that the XFX 8600 GT XXX vastly outperformed 6600 GT class cards, while offering only slight performance gains over 7600 GT cards. However, if you consider that the 8600's all utilize the new unified shader model, and with PureVideo HD (for optimized Blu-Ray and HD DVD playback), as having Coverage Sampling Antialiasing technology (which reduces the processing strain of AA on your GPU), then going the 8600 GT/GTS route makes a lot of sense. Especially when you can find 8600 GT's retailing for only 10 or 20 dollars more than the 7600 GT's. 

But what 8600 GT/GTS should you chose? Well, that's what we are going to try to help you decide. The good news is that you have no shortage of options. The competitors we have selected for this roundup,  in alphabetical order are: the Asus EN8600 GTS, the Asus EN8600 GTS TOP, the Gigabyte 8600 GT, the Gigabyte 8600 GTS OC, MSI's NX8600 GTS, the XFX 8600 GT, and the XFX 8600 GTS.

Here is a brief chart comparing the vital digits of these editions:

As you are probably aware, this chart doesn't really tell the whole story. All these cards are playing in the same league, so, when considering one edition over the other, you will probably want to look at other factors beyond clock speeds -- such as the bundled software, price, and cooling options for example -- in order to better help you make 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...