Test Rig Configuration

That's it about the card itself, from a hardware and design point of view. Leaving you with all with this impression on the Sparkle GeForce 8600 GTS we are going to move to the performance you can expect from this graphics accelerator. The system used to compile and analyze the gaming performance figures is build around the high-end Intel Core 2 Duo technology, which will provide extensive central processing power supporting the G84 visual and processing capabilities. We are using our new and high performing system based around the Intel 975X Express chipset powering our mainboard. So, let's go through the system specifications...

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86GHz Dual Core Processor
• ASUS P5W Digital Home Deluxe (i975X) Mainboard
• G.Skill Extreme 2GB PC2-6400 Dual Channel Memory
• Sparkle GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB Graphics Card
• PowerColor Radeon X1950 PRO 256MB Graphics Card
• Western Digital 320GB Caviar SE 8MB Cache Hard Disk
• Speeze RockeTeer 600W (SLI Ready) Power Supply
• Cooler Master Stacker 832 (RC-832) Tower Case
• Arctic Cooling MX-2 Performance Thermal Compound
• Dell UltraSharp 30" 3007WFP (Black) LCD Flat Display
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional incl. SP2 Edition

As you can see we have used the some high performance components, and we would like to express our thanks to Sparkle, G.Skill and PowerColor for their generosity on supplying us with some excellent hardware. The ASUS mainboard is based around the Intel 975X chipset supporting the Intel Core 2 Duo processor and DDR2 memory. We will be using our modest Core 2 Duo E6300 but running at 2.8GHz to support the high-end graphics cards. So both the mainboard and CPU are fine tuned to support this overclocking, to provide the maximum compatible and stable clock speeds. Currently the Core 2 Duo processors are the top of the market, with AMD trailing behind.

And a very special thank you to Dollarshops for supplying us a retail sample of the Sparkle GeForce 8600 GTS edition. This very flexible way of using the GeForce 8600 GTS graphics accelerator allowed us to do some extra tweaking, and analysis on the actual impact of the shader clock on the gaming performance. We truly enjoyed playing with the Sparkle GeForce 8600 series, and gave us great pleasure.

Additional Specifications

First we will grab some information from Everest Ultimate Edition and get some feedback on the video card sub system. Lavalys was nice enough to allow us to evaluate their software for our reviews. I really like the wealth of information this utility gives us and we thank Lavalys for their support. Everest Ultimate Edition 2007 is the cutting-edge benchmarking and diagnostics tool to maximize security, performance, and troubleshooting capabilities for home and office PC environments, PC professionals and consulting firms as well as OEM partners and configuration centers worldwide. We ran some analyzing tests using Everest and this is what we got.

Just as we saw previously with the GeForce 8800 series, the unified shader technology is now going full steam ahead. We don't speak anymore about fixed vertex and pixel shaders but about stream processors that can be used according to what is required. So these stream processors are capable of being dynamically allocated to vertex, pixel, geometry or physics operations. The Sparkle GeForce 8600 GTS version comes clocked at 675/2000MHz with a shader clock at 1450MHz, which are actually the standard clock speeds. The GeForce 8600 GTS edition is powered by the G84 core and features 32 stream processors and 8 raster operations units. Before going further, we would like to show of the Sparkle GeForce 8600 GTS card being placed in our system. Let's do that and see how the GeForce 8600 GTS edition fills up a free PCI Express expansion slot.

Yeah installed and ready to power our system. But before we go on, this card looks good in our system, what am I saying it looks awesome! We can already notice that the cooling does not interfere with surrounding motherboard components. And due to the fact that the Sparkle GeForce 8600 GTS edition is a single slot design it fits perfectly in our case. So you are right, the reference design by NVIDIA for the GeForce 8600 GTS doesn't take much roam, and then again it comes with a very decent cooling solution even at full load. That's it folks, time to hit up some synthetic benchmarks. We used the ForceWare 158.22 drivers from NVIDIA and will be using Futuremark and AquaMark benchmark utilities and stack up some popular game titles. Let's hit the road...