With new cards coming out every few months it is easy to forget that not all of us tend to stay up to date on which card is the fastest or which one delivers the best image quality. The irony is that quite often people who know the most about the graphics cards they use are also the people who spend more time running tech demos than actually playing games. What about gamers that aren't interested in when NVIDIA will release the next series and don't care who is winning the graphics card war? As far as they are concerned higher shader clocks mean nothing and their graphics card is perfect for them for as long as they can enjoy their games at reasonable resolutions. - DriverHeaven

XFX GeForce 8600 GT 256MB Fatal1ty Series Review

This is where Fatal1ty steps in, with his series of products aimed at gamers. They usually aren’t the fastest or most feature packed items on the market, but they still stick out because of their exceptional quality and eye-catching design. The fact that the most famous professional gamer stands behind them doesn't hurt either. Couple that with XFX, one of the best graphics cards manufacturers out there and you have a very capable partnership. When it comes to designing the box art of their products, XFX have refined the process to an art. The package undoubtedly has the most hardcore description of all.

Back when we checked the XFX GeForce 8600 GT XXX edition we were very impressed with the card. Not only did the card look great due to the black PCB, but the minuscule cooler performed well above expectations, keeping the card cool regardless of the high overclock XFX used. Well, if anyone had a chance to beat the XXX card it was XFX themselves. You guessed it, the Fatal1ty card looks better, it is absolutely silent and is a tad faster thanks to the 100MHz memory clock increase in memory speed, bringing it up to 1700MHz effective. This should bring the Fatal1ty series on top of the GeForce 8600 GT range.

We were hoping for an additional GPU core speed increase, but because of the passive cooler XFX decided to remain with 620MHz. The shader clocks also remained unchanged, so meaning 1355MHz instead of the stock 1190MHz a standard GT card would have. Looking at the memory we see that XFX are using 256MB of Samsung GDDR3 memory chips rated at 1.2ns. We have concerns with this, as XFX are running them 100MHz over the specifications, meaning 1600MHz modules running at 1700MHz, and on a passively cooled card this could well be a recipe for disaster.

Instead of running at the stock 540MHz, the GeForce 8600 GT Fatal1ty is overclocked right out of the box. With that in mind we didn't expect much overclocking potential, as the passive cooler was probably being stressed to the limit. The NVIDIA nTune application wasn't much use, as it not only reported artifacts when we tried to raise the GPU clocks, but it actually lowered them when we left it up to the software to find the highest stable overclock possible. Being confident that we were better at this than some automated utility, we user Rivatuner to try and overclock the card.

Rarely does a card manage to impress us before we even take it out from the box. As noted in the beginning of the article, the GeForce 8600 GT Fatal1ty just oozes quality out of every transistor. The passive cooling solution made us appreciate the days when graphics cards didn't need a 100mm fan just to keep them working, let alone two power connectors to supply enough juice. That said, we have some concerns with XFX running the memory beyond Samsung's specifications especially on a passively cooled card. The fact we achieved no further manual overclocks would verify that the memory is right at the limit.

The best part of the whole package is the extremely low price. We half expected the card to cost at least twenty or thirty pounds more than a regular GeForce 8600 GT, but at £111 the card is only a pound pricier than the XXX version.The low price coupled with the amazing performance, noiseless operation and HD video decoding capability make this one of the best GeForce 8600 GT cards available on the market.