Under the Hood, Checking Out the Engine...

Had enough about the look and feel of the GeForce 8600 GTS series? Well, then it's time to dig a bit deeper. Let's see what lies beneath the cooling system of the Sparkle GeForce 8600 GTS graphics accelerator. We are taking a look under the hood by pulling of the cooling solution. As you know by removing the cooling system you are voiding the warranty of your graphics card. So, only for those who don't care about the warranty and want to see what's underneath, with proper handling the heatsink can be removed for whatever reasons. However we don't recommend it, but we did want to share the real stuff that makes the GTS what it is today.

To get rid of the cooler, it is just a matter to remove the screws. Doing so you can remove the heatsink covering the graphical processing unit and the memory chips. As the heatsink didn't cover the full PCB, taking it off isn't that spectacular as what we have seen with the GeForce 8800 series. In fact most of the components have been visible from the start on the front of the PCB. Once the heatsink was removed we get a good view of the PCB and see that it isn't that overloaded with resistors and voltage regulators. Quite a blank view, with only the G84 core, memory chips and the reference clock regulator. Sober though very efficient and with some real processing potential.

The Sparkle GeForce 8600 GTS is powered by the new G84 series line of graphics processors. The G84 core used is physically the same chip as you will find back on the GeForce 8600 GT video cards and features the unified shader technology, represented by the stream processors. The NVIDIA G84 chip uses an 80nm manufacturing process for its high performance circuits and has been designed from scratch around the unified shader logic, though along the lines of the more powerful G80 chip. The GeForce 8600 GTS core works at 675MHz operation speed, actually a much higher clocked than the GeForce 8800 series. And most of the pre-overclocked versions come with the core clock set at 700MHz and ever a bit more.

	Radeon X1950 PRO	GeForce 8600 GTS
Core Speed	575MHz	675MHz
Memory Speed	1380MHz	2000MHz
Memory Size	256MB GDDR3	256MB GDDR3
Memory Interface	256-bit	128-bit
HDCP Support	Compliant	Yes

With the introduction of the G80 core we see that a new era being kicked off which is all about the unified shader technology. This technology is also taken up in the mid-range GeForce 8 series. To incorporate this within the GeForce 8600 series we see that NVIDIA has come up with the stream processors which can be used in a unified way as either vertex or pixel shader. That means that these are no longer fixed to just being a vertex or pixel shader, but their function changes according to the processing needs. With a unified GPU architecture some bottleneck between pixel, shader and geometric processing is reduced to a great extend. With the release of the G84 chip, NVIDIA did a bit of optimizations towards the stream processors to provide even greater performance. The combination of greater resource availability and improved scheduling allow for increased efficiency.

The Sparkle GeForce 8600 GTS comes with four memory chips in total which are all located on the front side of the board. The memory chips are placed strategically around the G84 core. Each of these memory chips gives their heat away to the coolers aluminum sole via elastic rubber-like thermal pads. By cooling the memory chips on their own, it provides extra protection towards the lifetime of the chips in general. The ram chips are placed two by two and give a total of 256MB memory. Some brands went one step further and equipped the GTS with 512MB memory, which will have an impact on the PCB and the location of the chips around the graphics card.

With 256MB GDDR3 memory the Sparkle GeForce 8600 GTS is well equipped for experiencing the full graphical power of current and upcoming gaming technology. It features Samsung branded GDDR3 memory which is running at 2.0GHz speed. These Samsung GDDR3 chips come marked as 1.0ns access time and are therefore rated at 2.0GHz frequency and operating at 1.9V. So what does that mean...no overclocking? Well, not at all as these Samsung memory chips can easily reach over 2.2GHz! And maybe even more. These chips are known to go really fast and do feature some extra room for overclocking right out of the box. Well that's about it on the insights of the Sparkle GeForce 8600 GTS graphics card, I guess it is time to put this one to work and show some of the performance figures. So we will just reassemble it again, and start our engines!