Yesterday, was marked by the arrival of the mid range Nvidia Dx10 cards- the 8600series and the 8500.

Click HERE to view the specifications clearly

The 8800 GTX has 128 units, the GTS cards have 96 shader units. But unfortunately the 8600’s have 32 and the 8500’s have 16. Now this is something really bad from nvidia, there should have been atleast 48 in the 8600’s.

For those who are interested in HD DVD decoding, you will also be happy to know that the GeForce 8600 GTS comes with a new video processor (VP2) that allows the CPU to completely offload the processing of H.264 a new content to the GeForce 8600 GTS. This means much lower CPU utilization than even the GeForce 8800 GTX, whose VP1 processor can only do motion compensation and deblocking.

There are various brands and manufacturers that released the new series of graphic cards yesterday.

The Point of view

The Point of view Exo edition GeForce 8600 GTS comes with 725 MHz core frequency and 1100 MHz memory frequency.
And, yeah not to forget, theres a all new game included in it… guess which one…
its S.T.A.L.K.E.R. This is a really great package.

XFX

XFX came up with its two cards; the 8600GT and the 8600GTS edition.
And not to forget, the GTS is a great value for buck, it comes with Ghost recon Advanced Warfighter(full game).
This card is XXX edition as well. This card is a great performer.

BFG

BFG came up with its 8600GTS edtion 256mb PCIe (pre overclocked edition). This card has a lifetime warranty.This card is HDCP capable. This package is a bit expensive and you wont get any games with it.

Asus

The ASUS Extreme N8600GTS TOP features 256MB of memory, a core clock of 675MHz and a memory frequency of 2GHz which is all very impressive. The GeForce 8600 GT and 8600 GTS are essentially the same product, with the only difference being the core and memory clock frequencies.
This card is priced at 229$, thats really worth its price.

MSI

MSI NX8600GT comes with 1200Mhz shader clock and 2000Mhz memory clock.

the front is their “normal” shield and fin style cooler.

This card will cost you just under £100. In addiition to it, it comes with a 2 year warranty.

Sparkle

The Sparkle GeForce 8600 GTS comes with 256MB of GDDR3 RAM running at 2GHz DDR. This gives it a texture fill rate of 10,800 megatexels/s and a memory bandwidth of 32GB/s.

Galaxy

here’s the new Galaxy GeForce 8600 GTS. A lot of stuff is customized on this card both internally & externally. A zalman cooler is fixed over the card to cool. The Shader core is pumped from 1450 towards 1620 MHz.
At the back we see the 6-pin power connector. The card should roughly consume 75 Watts when it peaks with the overclocks.

Thinktechno opinion…

Well have a look at that shader clocks from Galaxy and XFX, they are at the highest spot. That’s why for their GTS models the performance is slightly above the rest.

The card by BFG is certainly great, but it lacks the kick in it, but one must not forget the warranty offered by them.

MSI has again used their classic cooler, which really helps to get some good overclock.

The point of view has also turned to be great with thier Exo overclock.

Well if one wants performance then the XFX 8600GTS XXX edition is certainly great. Its a great value for money. Overall performance is just great compared to the other competitors.

Well regarding the prices, the fastest clocked versions will be slightly more expensive and will offer better frame rates. Your budget decides your choice.