Introduction

Welcome to the world of Gainward, a world beyond your senses! Gainward is a world leading producer of high-quality, high-end 3D accelerators for the personal computer market. Gainward offers a full product line of value adding products targeting gaming enthusiasts as well as entry-level consumers. Founded in 1984, Gainward has grown exponentially in the channel, serving the system builder, distribution and retail markets with products that offer the highest in quality and customer satisfaction, thereby making the computing experience transparent to the hardware supplied in the box. Their graphics products are known to deliver an incredible realistic gaming experience and highlighting effects as never seen or experienced before. Together with Gainward we invite you to embark on the ride to the future...

With the introduction of the first GeForce 8 series at the end of last year we only saw from NVIDIA the high-end product range coming to the market to take over and rule the graphics world. Since then NVIDIA has been working hard to get their mid-range cards ready for the public and to finally offer full DirectX 10 and Windows Vista support to the average users. Over a month ago NVIDIA launched the GeForce 8600 series which was done by releasing two versions, the GeForce 8600 GT and the bigger brother the GTS both featuring the highly anticipated G84 graphics core. And Gainward has jumped on the wagon to be amongst the first to release their products based upon this optimized G84 chipset, and differentiating even more by offering as well a Golden Sample version.

The G80 chipset from NVIDIA has been going strong for quite some time now with no real competition until recently with the showing of the Radeon HD 2900 XT accelerator. But to counter the Ultra version was released which somehow wasn't needed looking at the performance figures. Maybe in time the same could be said of the G84 chip, as currently the cards based upon this graphics core don't have any counterpart from ATI yet. Yes we mean and say yet, as these should be coming very shortly. At least they have been announced by AMD, but are not yet available as such. If these will be able to go upon against the GeForce 8600 GTS remains to be seen, but it doesn't look good if we just go by the rumors floating around. Wait and see, but NVIDIA seems to have the upper hand again.

The GeForce 8600 GTS is the successor to the popular GeForce 7600 GT, widely received as the best value DirectX 9.0c graphics card of the past year. With the GeForce 8600 GTS, gamers will enjoy the same unrivalled value and performance for DirectX 10. The GeForce 8600 series are available in two configurations, the GeForce 8600 GTS and the little brother GeForce 8600 GT accelerator. The GeForce 8600 GPU's contains 289 million transistors and implements a highly parallel, unified shader design, consisting of 32 individual stream processors. The GeForce 8600 is a distinct new chip from the GeForce 8800 and tweaks have been made to the architecture to improve the per clock shader performance.

Main Features

GeForce 8600 GTS (G84 at 725MHz) 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 Memory (2200MHz) High-speed 128-bit Memory Interface Memory Bandwidth of 35.2GB/s PCI Express x16 Compatibility High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection H.264 Playback with PureVideo Engine Multi-GPU SLI Bridge Interconnect Support DVI-I Connector for Analog/Digital Display

When we look back at the G80 chip, we could definitely say it was a great improvement over the previous G71 core adding quite some complexity and advance logic. The G80 core was a completely new design dedicated to the unified shader environment that the new DirectX 10 has somehow enforced. That means that you can't speak about fixed vertex, pixel or texture units but these are now combined in what NVIDIA calls stream processors. Each stream processor is capable of being dynamically allocated to vertex, pixel, geometry or physics operations for the utmost efficiency in GPU resource allocation. With the G84 chip, the same logic is applied but in a reduced, tweaked application.

The Gainward box comes with some plastic shrink wrap around it. So we had to remove the plastic covering first. This is an extra protection to the package as a whole. The box itself details very clearly the product that you are buying as well as the main features, that it is a PCI Express card with high performance GDDR3 memory. A meanly brown colored box, yellow/black which are the main colors of Gainward. What you will notice as well is the Golden Sample indication, which generally means that it is an overclocked version, with full warranty offered by Gainward on these high clock speeds. The box is a somehow standard package with the Golden Sample and HDCP sticker that was applied afterwards and with Windows Vista certified label.

Turning the Golden Sample box around we find out even more details on the product enclosed. The back of the paperboard package lists all the features of the BLISS 8600 GTS graphics card and what is included in the package. Further checking the box reveals also some more information on the sides that might come in handy upon purchase of the BLISS 8600 GTS Golden Sample, like the system requirements and also the contact details. All these add up in the first impression of the Gainward package, a very detailed and professional box. As far as the box goes, it certainly is very attractive...