I'm pretty excited about the GeForce 8600GTS to be honest. Although prospective performance claims are one thing, actual benchmarks are another, so we'll have to see how it fares in reality. Nonetheless it is a good pricepoint and a great upgrade for those that don't have the money to spend on the 8800 series cards. I'm sure with a little overclocking you can get quite close to their performance level. Team that up with a Core 2 Duo, lets say a E6600, 2Gb of memory and you've got a mean gaming rig.

Best regards,

heck man a E4300 and its a Mean Machine. BTW To let you know bro ive yet to break in the card i have lol. Also for all we know the DX10 cards now are probably not ready for the games comming out. Forgot do you have a website for power drawing of certain parts?

Sander, I agree, I think the 8600GTS looks like a winner for sure.

BTW, due to you posting the article, does that mean NDA has been lifted? (I know you usually stick to the NDA, if you have one)

Any chance you have any products to test?

Dublingunner,



I wouldn't know, they didn't serve me with one. What I've written is based on information I collected from various sources including a few board partner contacts. It is more of a preview of things to come rather than an actual hands on review, as then you'd see benchmarks etc.

Best regards,

If it delievers 8800GTS 320mb performance, or pretty close too it, then maybe I can go for a cheap Core 2 and one of those 86GTS cards later this year.

the 512mb model would need to have a clock speed of 750Mhz to keep up with a stock 8800gts, as it has 50% more shaders than the 8600gts.

Cheers Sander

Mid-range graphics cards are excellent! They got the best price/performance ratio which allows people to do some serious gaming without breaking the bank. My 6600Gt which is over 2 years old, is still able to play most of todays games with a decent frame rate. You gotta love it!

I definitely think its time for an upgrade though. I have two possible upgrade paths:
1) Wait a few months, build a new system (Core 2 Duo, 2GB DDR2 RAM, 8600GTS) Expensive but effective.
2) Wait a few months, cheap out and upgrade to an Direct X 10 AGP card and 2GB DDR. This option is really up the the graphic manufactures, as they haven't confirmed any Direct X 10 AGP card rumors. This upgrade path would have limited upgrade opportunity and offer less performance then the other path. It's cheap though.

I'm not sure we'll ever see a DX10 AGP card, when we do, and when it is faster than current 7600GTs, I'm buying one. I still have a AGP system I use often and I see no reason to replace it as with a Nortwood at 3.72GHz and 2GB of memory it can still keep pace with most modern machines.

Best regards,

Nvidia is planning on agp DX10 card.let me find the review ill post back in a few


http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37790

Mothow said:

It's a rumor!

I'll spell it out for you S-L-O-W, might be DirectX 10 compatible, but isn't a match for the graphic card I have in that system at the moment, that's the elusive X800XT PE (Personal Edition, authographed by ATI top execs).

Best regards,

yeah, the 7600gs is severely crippled, in fact, it should have been named 7500gs or something.

I take it you received that card during happier times? j/k

I love my x1800xt, so my new card will have to be significantly faster, so maybe the 8600gts is not for me.

Would seem a shame going from high end to mid range................

MMM yes when I finally decide to suck it up and build a new rig I'll be slapping in a 8600

Exactly what I have been waiting for. I see a "Crysis" in my future!
Jim

Northwood at 3.72Ghz? That's pretty impressive. Which model is that? I got the 2.66Ghz Northwood and it easily can get up to 3.4ghz.

Its a 3.2GHz, engineering sample from Intel, 3.72GHz on air, with a Thermalright XP120 as discussed here:

http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/reviews/article/1770/

Best regards,

Oh 520Mhz overclock. Yeah thats pretty good even for a 3.2Ghz chip. My Northwood is good for a 600mhz overclock.

Hello. When using Vista x64 Ultimate in full Aero mode, one of these new DX10 nVidia cards, and a dual monitor desktop of 3200x1200 (2 by 1600x1200), is it the amount of video card memory that matters the most?

I thought I read somewhere that the Aero GUI keeps entire windows in video memory in order to do its special effects so should I be concerned if one of these cards only has 128 or 256MB of memory?

I would hate to buy a new card but then learn it will function much slower due to my desktop resolution/size.

Thanks, Joe

Hey Sander,
I had a X800XT PE in my old system, and i thought that the PE stood for Platinum Edition? Definitely didnt have any autographing on it...I think I got jibbed . Good card though. On my old Skt754 system with LESS RAM and LESS cpu clockspeed I was getting higher FPS in Half Life 2 and CS:S.
Lol. The 8600GTS sounds good. $200US=easily 400$AU after the inflated prices we get down here. The 8800GTS320M is selling for I believe around 500-550$AU...hmm...sounds not so good anymore...

Cheers
John

Joe Gonko said:

For such a large resolution, one card is fine for windows, but if you wanna play games or anything graphically intense, you would need SLI 8800GTX or Quadro

Joe Gonko said:

It depends if you run any games.

In 2D you only need 3200x1200x3 Bytes Video rAm, which is about 11MB.

I don't know, how much memory Aero uses at such a resolution, but I don't think, that it could be a problem, because from waht I heard Aero doesn't need very much graphics power.