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Midrange Cards: NVIDIA GeForce 8600 Round-Up - PAGE 4
Kevin Spiess - Monday, June 18th, 2007

Micro-Star International has one card in this round-up, and it's the NX8600 GTS OC.  The OC stands for -- you guessed it -- "Overclock Edition."

To make a purely subjective observation, the NX8600 GTS stands out from the rest of the pack -- when it comes to aesthetics. As you can see in the photos below, the board itself is red, and the both DVI's are yellow, giving the card a color scheme usually associated with ATI Radeon cards.  

Judging by appearance, out of all the cards in this round-up, this MSI card appears to have most robust cooling solution. This is not a humongous surprise, as this card is a factory overclocked edition. But when compared to the ASUS 8600 GTS TOP, or any other card in this round-up, the MSI cooler looks like it is the most effective, and not to mention most expensive, cooler of the bunch. The card cooling system is composed of a thin-finnned aluminum heatsink connected to a copper heatpipe and a good sized, dual-slot fan. Like the Gigabyte 8600 GTS, this card is a double width card, so it'll take up a bit more space in your case.


If the robust design of this fan had one trade off, it'd be the sound envelope: this card is probably the loudest of all the cards in our roundup. Fortunately, this is mitigated by a option that is undocumented in the (very slight) manual: the card has both a 4 pin and a 3 pin power connector -- if you'd prefer less noise instead of performance, it is a simple matter to unplug the 4 power connector, and plug in the 3 pin connector instead; and after you switch to the 3 pin connector, the card runs much quieter, at about roughly 80% fan speed. It's just a simple matter of running the fan at power levels of either 5 Volts or at 12 Volts by switching connectors. Hence, low and high speed.

This MSI card comes with a molex to PCI-E power cable, a S-Video cable, two DVI to VGA adapters, and a HDTV cable -- but the bundle does not include a game. Curently, the  NX8600 GTS retails around $170.

next: XFX »

Article Index

1.Introduction
2.Asus
3.Gigabyte
4.MSI
5.XFX
6.Benchmarking Setup
7.3DMark06
8.Far Cry & Splinter Cell:Chaos Theory
9.Doom 3 & Quake 4
10.F.E.A.R. & Prey
11.X3 & Company of Heroes
12.Power Consumption
13.Conclusion

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