8600 Gt Review

Greg King

I just kinda show up...
Staff member
It's a solid card for anyone looking to push a lower resolution on older games. Company of Heroes absolutely kicked the card in the teeth but for me, the primary game that I continue to play is HL2 and Counter Strike and that care appears to play those games well. Not sure how well it will handle the newer DX10 games but it is priced at a reasonable level.

Why in the hell did they not benchmark Supreme Commander? It was included in the bundle and could have shown how well the card handles newer titles. Silly...
 

b1lk1

Tech Monkey
I have been a member of Tweaktown for a long time and I do like the site, but let's just say I don't always agree with their testing methodology and their results. Anyhow, that does look like a decent card. I am very tempted to get a few for SLI and see what they can do, although I'd probably run GTS's for the extra shaders. I have been looking for SLI results to see just how well the shaders work together in game, but there is really noone doing it much.
 

Merlin

The Tech Wizard
I have another one ordered from tiger, be here Tuesday, I think.
I'll run in SLI and see what they do together.

I'm still waiting for new cards from nVidia

Merlin
 

Tech-Daddy

Tech Monkey
Since I run @ 1280x1024, I'm thinking that my next round of upgrades is going to be this 8600GTS card...

The 8800's are just out of my price band!
I'm liking what I see though....
;)
 

b1lk1

Tech Monkey
At that resolution, you should be fine. In fact, the biggest performance issue with the 8600's is the 128-bit memory bus. If Nvidia put a 256bit bus (and they should have for hte $$$ of them) it would be a serious contender. But any way you look at it, at lower resolutions you'll probably CPU bottleneck first anyways.
 

Merlin

The Tech Wizard
8600 GT in SLI

I got the second card today and installed.
It took a few tries to get the system to see the 2nd card, I took out the driver and reinstalled to get it to see it.
Then I ran the DX 10 Lost Planet Demo.
With the PC performance test with one card, I got and average of 28 frame rates
With two cards I got an average of 48 frame rates in all three catagories.Snow, Cave and Outside.
All at the same resolution of 1280 X 1024

Like I said before, I'm still waiting for the next nvidia card to come out, not an overclocked version of the 8800, but a NEW series of cards.
These cards I can put in my other machine after I get the new card.

Merlin
 

Merlin

The Tech Wizard
8600 GT in SLI

Got the other card yesterday and installed.

It took a while to get the board to see the 2nd card, I had to remove the drivers then reinstall

Since this image, I turned the Zalmon to face the back as someone had said to do here and Yes, better temps
I was running 120*F and now down to 112*F under gaming with hl2 Deathmatch
Res= 1280 X 1024 on an Acer 22" LCD

I'll have to see what it is on the 42" plasma

Deckard
 
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Greg King

I just kinda show up...
Staff member
High end cards.... low end cards.... any setup with SLi looks amazing. Congrats on the purchase. I look forward to hearing your results on the big screen.
 

b1lk1

Tech Monkey
Upcoming games will show the limitations of the 128-bit memory bus when gaming over 1280X1024. You won't be able to run much over medium settings unless you keep the resolution down. I am not trying to downtalk your setup, as it is very nice and will give you great framerates. But even the 8800GTS 320MB cards are going to have some big limitations due to the lack of VRAM and new games looking for the most VRAM possible.

Enjoy those cards. SLI rules for keeping the minimum FPS much higher than a single card, and like DS says, the visuals will be awesome either way you look at it. I too am very interested to see how your bigscreen experiment goes.
 

Merlin

The Tech Wizard
8600Gt On 42" Plasma

This is my first SLI machine, just remember.:eek:
At first I couldnt get the Plasma to show up in the Nvidia setting.
So I took it out of SLI and to dual monitor mode.
First I used the , what looks like S-Video adapter and used the RBG cables to the Plasma.
Really bad image there that way and also distorted lines.
Then I used a DVI-I / HDMI cable, coming right out the #1card.
Fantastic image that way, I dunno id it was the other cable or the adapter that comes with the cards.
Anyway, here is an image taken with Digital camera.
And resized to fit the specs here at Techgage.

Merlin:eek:
 
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