After several weeks of delays, mainstream DirectX 10 offerings from NVIDIA are finally ready. Graphzilla is shipping massive quantities of these cards, and you can expect some to be headed towards local retail or e-tail store as we write these words. NVIDIA kept its promise and continued to do hard launches, only this time there will be no three week delay between first and second batch of cards. If you have been following the site, you could have learned that there were problems that Graphzilla needed to fix, but now the products with first shipping revision of the GPU are out. Second revision will come in couple of weeks, but we will be talking about cards you can go and buy out today. - The Inquirer

NVIDIA GeForce 8600 Series Graphics Card Review

Truth to be told, the GeForce 8600 GT could fare far better with the name GeForce 8600 GS, but NVIDIA wanted to leave the GS marking for OEM products, so readers will have to swim in the sea of different naming conventions all over again. The GeForce 8600 GT is a product based on the G84-300 series GPU, and features 32 scalar shaders, 16 texture memory units and 8 raster operations pipelines. This means the 32 shader units should be enough to fill eight complete pixels in each and every cycle. To make sure 540MHz clocked ROP's will shove out eight pixels per clock, each shader unit set at 1.19GHz.

The G84-400 is a bit of a different beast. This chip boasts the same technical specifications as the G84-300, but at different clocks. Scalar shaders are clocked to 1.45GHz when GPU is clocked at reference 675MHz, and 128-bit memory controller communicates only with GDDR3 memory at 2GHz effective or above. Our sample was provided to us by Sparkle, company that predominately manufactures reference boards for other brands. For its own product, it opted for a custom design. Real overclocking however, will be possible with their Calibre version that will appear in couple of weeks.

However, the GeForce 8600 GTS is the star of this article. The new board for the $200 bracket succeeds the GeForce 7600 GT and, as we know right now, AMD will not have an answer for it. Gainward is the company that moved from the reference design the most with their Golden Sample boards that are known for great overclocking scores. This is the only card that features a dual slot cooling with a big and silent fan in the middle of the board. It goes without saying that all three boards featured silent fans. We hope we will not need to write about silent fans in the future.

So, EVGA and Sparkle had similar green boards, but clocks were different. Actually EVGA clocked its e-GeForce 8600 GTS to a default 675/2000MHz, the Gainward Golden Sample was clocked at 725/2200MHz and Sparkle was clocked all the way to 729/2213MHz, taking the pole position of the GTS clocks. The memory used on every GTS card was no other than Samsung's own 1.0ns GDDR3 chips. Howeevr, not everything is great, the GeForce 8600 GTS has 32 stream processors and even in SLI mode, the boards cannot reach performance of a single GeForce 8800 GTX card.

In short, NVIDIA did a brilliant job and replaced its GeForce 7600 GT and GS with rock solid performing, DirectX 10 compliant parts. These parts are more far apart from the high-end of the past, but give surprisingly good value for money. The GeForce 8600 GT comes a bit short on expectations, so we would advise you to bite the bullet and opt for a higher performing part. If you are considering multi-GPU configuration, just go straight for glory and get a high-end part.