These NVIDIA GeForce 8600 mainstream graphic cards have been coming out of the woodwork lately. We checked a couple of GeForce 8600 GTS cards at launch and just recently looked at the MSI GeForce 8600 GTS OC Edition. As far as pure speed, the GeForce 8600 GTS runs the bulk of DirectX 9.0c games much like the GeForce 7900 GT, which is surprising as I would have thought it would have been ahead of these cards. Just what is the GeForce 8600 GTS exactly? First off, it is a graphics card based on the newly designed 80nm G84 core which is an optimized though reduced version of the 90nm G80 core used on the popular GeForce 8800 series. - nV News

Inno3D iChill 8600 GTS XStriker3 Video Card Review

Where the G80 has an estimated 681 million transistors the G84 has only 289 million. Still, this means that the GeForce 8600 GTS mainstream card has more transistors than NVIDIA's previous high-end G71 graphics chip. The new GeForce 8600 series core has been improved to enable better shader performance per clock. Texture processors can now calculate eight texture addresses per clock instead of the four that the GeForce 8800 series can calculate, enabling the ability to sample more unique texture locations in the memory. This processor includes a new video processor as well as a bitstream processor engine.

While all this sounds very good, the downside is that the G84 comes with 32 stream processors onboard. This is down significantly from the 128 stream processors of the G80 chipset. The memory interface on the G84 is 128-bit, which is down from the 384-bit of the G80. Yes, the design has been improved, but there seems to be significant performance gap between the GeForce 8600 GTS and the GeForce 8800 GTS, with 320MB memory in the GeForce 8800 series. And we are wondering what is there to fill the gap? Well that is where this Inno3D special version of the GeForce 8600 GTS could come into play.

From half way around the world we received their elite rendition of the GeForce 8600 GTS, the iChill 8600 GTS XStriker3. They have an upfront claim of air boost technology, heatpipe technology, and a silent cooler with large airflow. This is all wrapped up in one compact GeForce 8600 GTS package. Since we have been working on a low budget, high-performance gaming rig, anything concerning air cooling gets our immediate attention. These cooling claims certainly did it, and we are eager to see what is so special about this Inno3D iChill 8600 GTS XStriker3 card compared to the rest of the pack.

With all the variations of the NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS cards hitting the market one thing definite can be said for Inno3D's iChill 8600 GTS XStriker3, its iChill cooling solution works great! With the successful application of the iChill cooling solution on the GeForce 8600 GTS XStriker3, we can clearly state that Inno3D has hit a home run with this mainstream entry.