Introduction

It is a first time for everyone, and this time we can introduce you to Point of View. Looking at Point of View, which was established in the year 2000, has quite simply been a success story. Since its inception, the sales of Point of View graphics cards have grown exponentially and their brand can now be seen in more than 30 European countries. Point of View is based in Holland with a European, multi-lingual sales team. However, the company includes different other branches which are located all over the world, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, France and USA. Point of View prides itself on the high level of customer service, having excellent warranty on all products, very efficient RMA and good technical support. Their focus is on supporting their distributors to supply top quality products and to present an exciting and marketable brand name to retailers.

Everyone must surely remember the introduction of the GeForce 8800 series on the last quarter of last year by NVIDIA. Well, about 6 months later it is time to reveal again a new product range from NVIDIA which is focused towards the mid-range graphics card market. Yeah indeed, there isn't any counterpart yet available from ATI, or better AMD but that doesn't make much of a difference for NVIDIA. They have successfully introduced the first DirectX 10 compliant graphics accelerators for the high-end market, and well now is the moment to do the same for the mid-range segment. This is where the GeForce 8600 series comes into the picture, and NVIDIA has again two versions available. The first one being the GeForce 8600 GTS, and a lower version with the GT suffix.

For the most part, the specifications of the GeForce 8600 GTS directly resemble those of the high-end GeForce 8800 series. Based on the enormously successful GeForce 8800 series, the GeForce 8600 series brings DirectX 10 to the masses, empowering every PC gamer to enjoy the next generation graphical experience. The power of geometry shader, unique instancing, massive texture arrays and high dynamic range rendering will all be shown in an amazing line up of DirectX 10 titles coming out later this year. The GeForce 8600 series takes all the great architectural features of the GeForce 8800 series and makes it available at the popular $149-229 price point.

The GeForce 8600 GTS is the successor to the popular GeForce 7600 GT, widely received as the best value DirectX 9.0c graphics card of the past year. With the GeForce 8600 GTS, gamers will enjoy the same unrivalled value and performance for DirectX 10. The GeForce 8600 series are available in two configurations, the GeForce 8600 GTS and the little brother GeForce 8600 GT accelerator. The GeForce 8600 GPU's contains 289 million transistors and implements a highly parallel, unified shader design, consisting of 32 individual stream processors. The GeForce 8600 is a distinct new chip from the GeForce 8800 and tweaks have been made to the architecture to improve the per clock shader performance.

Main Features

• GeForce 8600 GTS (G84 at 675MHz)
• 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 Memory (2000MHz)
• High-speed 128-bit Memory Interface
• Memory Bandwidth of 32.0GB/s
• PCI Express x16 Compatibility
• High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection
• H.264 Playback with PureVideo Engine
• Multi-GPU SLI Bridge Interconnect Support
• DVI-I Connector for Analog/Digital Display

When we look back at the G80 chip, we could definitely say it was a great improvement over the previous G71 core adding quite some complexity and advance logic. The G80 core was a completely new design dedicated to the unified shader environment that the new DirectX 10 has somehow enforced. That means that you can't speak about fixed vertex, pixel or texture units but these are now combined in what NVIDIA calls stream processors. Each stream processor is capable of being dynamically allocated to vertex, pixel, geometry or physics operations for the utmost efficiency in GPU resource allocation. With the G84 chip, the same logic is applied but in a reduced, tweaked application.

Due to the G84 being a distinct new chip, based upon the same principles present on the GeForce 8800 series, it does set some expectations. And although the architecture is somehow deducted from the G80 chip, some tweaks have emerged to improve the per clock shader performance. In the GeForce 8800, each texture processor can calculate four texture addresses and perform eight filtering operations per clock. Well, in the GeForce 8600, each texture processor can calculate eight texture addresses and eight filtering operations per clock, permitting a greater number of unique texture locations to be sampled.

The GeForce 8600 GTS offers fantastic DirectX 9.0c performance, comprehensive DirectX 10 support, industry leading image quality and the second generation video engine at the $199-229 price point. Yes indeed, the GeForce 8600 GTS comes clocked at 675MHz core, with a shader clock of 1450MHz and the memory at 2000MHz effective. The card is a single slot design and requires a PCI Express power connector, with the maximum power draw of the board being 71 watts. The GeForce 8600 GTS features two dual link DVI outputs for connection to analog and digital displays. On top of that it also provides full support for HDMI, which can be implemented at the discretion of add-in board partners. With the GeForce 8600 series, all gamers got a chance to experience the DirectX 10 gaming wonders.