The GeForce 8600 GTS is based on NVIDIA's new G84 graphics processor, which is the new GPU for midrange products. It was launched recently to be used on the GeForce 8600 GT and GTS cards. TwinTech is following the NVIDIA reference design to the letter. The new line-up of GPU's actually conists of five different offerings. The GeForce 8600 GTS is the most powerful mainstream GPU, followed by the GeForce 8600 GT version. There is also a GeForce 8500 GT, which will not feature a seperate SLI connector, but will be capable of the dual graphics card standard from NVIDIA using PCI Express transfers. From TwinTech we'll be looking at the GTS edition. - techPowerUp!

TwinTech GeForce 8600 GTS Graphics Card Review

The box is about the typical size for a midrange product. It is colorful but shows all the important logos and information at a glance. This is very important in shops to make sure potential buyers know what they buy. The board is typical sized for a normal video card and comes with a single slot cooling solution. The back of the card is fairly standard, the only interesting thing I saw here is that two sets of mounting holes are present so the range of installable coolers is bigger, allowing manufacturers to pick from a wider range of heatsinks. Even though a power connector is required, this card is not extremely power hungry.

The cooler's design is fairly simple. A copper baseplate transfers heat to an outer shell which is made from cheaper and lighter material. This makes the cooler a cost effective, yet capable solution. As you can see the four memory chips are cooled as well with small white thermal pads sitting between memory and cooler. Instead of eight chips, NVIDIA cut down the board design to use only four memory chips on a 128-bit interface bus. This makes the board design a whole lot easier. On the other hand the limited bus width may limit performance in situations where a lot of memory bandwidth is required.

We used ATITool to automatically find the maximum clocks of the TwinTech GeForce 8600 GTS accelerator. The overclocking process works as easy as on any other NVIDIA card. There are no distinct values for 2D/3D clocks, the card always runs at 675/2000MHz by default. The overclocks are very limited. In the end the card runs totally stable at 727MHz core and 2150MHz memory effective. The small stock cooler does a good job at keeping the card cool. It does not get very hot, not even when overclocked. The fan noise is very acceptable for this kind of cooler.

TwinTech's GeForce 8600 GTS comes with a $210 price tag attached, which is fairly expensive for a product with that performance. When looking at the card's performance it is comparable to the Radeon X1950 GT and PRO cards. Especially the Radeon X1950 GT can be found a lot cheaper, but it doesn't have DirectX 10 support. If you are looking to spend a bit more money, to have a powerful card for this year at least, you should look into the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB which has all the great G80 technology, but isn't that much more expensive.