The NVIDIA GeForce 8600 series launch is already a while back. Now the first manufacturers are showing customized boards that include additional value for the end user. One of those companies is Zotac, the youngest NVIDIA board partner. Their GeForce 8600 GT ZONE Edition is running completely passive, without any active cooling fan. Also the user can feed audio signals from the motherboard, for example, into the card which then adds them to the HDMI signal for your digital TV. Also it has to be mentioned that Zotac uses 256MB of GDDR3 memory on this card. There are other cards on the market that use DDR2 to drive down price. - techPowerUp!

Zotac GeForce 8600 GT 256MB ZONE Edition Review

The packaging is colorful and communicates all important specifications right on the front. Further details and a product picture can be found on the back. There is an HDMI adapter included with the package. It plugs into one DVI port and has an HDMI plug on the other side which carries HDMI and HDCP. If you connect the internal audio cable to the VGA card it also carries the audio signal. The Zotac 8600 GT ZONE Edition is based on the regular GeForce 8600 GT design, but comes with a modified cooler that is running passive without fan. Please note that the whole card still needs only one slot.

The majority of the cooler is made from aluminum to save weight. Only the baseplate which is in direct contact with the core is copper. This helps spread the heat quickly and then dissipate it in the fins. Zotac mentions several times in the manual and on the package that some form of active cooling inside the case is strongly suggested to get rid of the hot air. Also SLI is possible with the GeForce 8600 GT and any other GeForce 8600 class product. Since the card uses a single slot cooling solution it is even possible to run it on motherboards where space between the slots is limited.

We used ATITool to search for the maximum core and memory clocks but the results were much too high. We then manually dropped the clocks until we were left with a completely stable system that could complete our testing suite without visual errors or crashes. The final overclocks of our card are 674MHz core and 1472MHz memory. The overclocks are most probably limited by the cooling solution, but consider this card is designed to be silent not to be an overclocking monster, so the limited overclocking should not be a major concern. Some active cooling would be recommeneded.

When we first tested NVIDIA's new GeForce 8600 series we quickly realized that the power consumption of these cards is quite low. Zotac used this feature to their advantage and put a passive cooler on their cards to remove any annoying fan noise. This adds additional value to this mid-range segment video card. ATI's Radeon HD 2000 series features additional audio output over HDMI. To ensure that their product can compete with ATI's offering on the Media PC market, Zotac added an external audio input that mixes the audio signal into the HDMI signal on the DVI output.

While the ATI solution generates the audio inside the GPU, the Zotac card requires an external audio source like on-board audio or a normal sound card. Performance wise there are no suprises, the card performs like a typical mid-range card with support for DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4.0. Overclocking potential is slim, but can still deliver nice extra performance, if you ensure proper cooling. With a price premium of about $10 this card is certainly worth its money especially if you consider that you can finally get rid of the annoying fan noise of your video card.