After taking a look at Galaxy's factory overclocked GeForce 8600 GT a few weeks ago, today is the turn of another, slightly higher specified, Galaxy board in the form of their GeForce 8600 GTS OC edition part. Again, Galaxy have opted to do away with the reference cooler for a third party offering, this time from Zalman, and once more clock speeds have been boosted to improve performance over a stock part. So we end up with a quite standard GeForce 8600 GTS, having a more silent cooling solution but with greater clock speeds. In the end this should offer superior performance and game play but keeping the card as silent and cool as possible with the Zalman cooling. - Elite Bastards

Galaxy GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB OC Graphics Review

The G84 chip is based upon the same basic design as NVIDIA's high-end G80 core, and thus features the same DirectX 10, unified shader architecture as its big brother. That aside, the G84 uses the smaller 80nm manufacturing process compared to the 90nm G80, packing 289 million transistors into its die. This allows for the core to feature a cut down G80-esque configuration, containing 32 stream processors and two raster operation partitions. Each stream processor cluster is assigned a single texturing unit, but these have been beefed up over those on show in G80 core.

The G84 also comes equipped with that bastion of the mid-range graphics board in the form of a 128-bit memory bus, compared to the 320-bit and 384-bit buses seen on G80. Finally, the G84 also features a brand spanking new video decoding engine known only as VP2, with almost full support for the entire H.264 and VC-1 high definition codecs. A reference GeForce 8600 GTS part features core and memory clock speeds of 675MHz and 2000MHz respectively, with the stream processors clocked at 1450MHz. Of course, today's Galaxy part is a factory overclocked one.

Compared to the GeForce 8600 GT part we looked at from Galaxy recently, this particular GeForce 8600 GTS is a little more conservative with regard to its overclocks. For starters, the 256MB of memory on-board hasn't been touched at all, leaving it at the stock speed of 2000MHz, while the G84 core sported by this card gets just a 45MHz boost, leaving it clocked at 720MHz over the reference speed of 675MHz. This also makes for a change in the clock speed of the core's stream processors, up to 1584MHz from the 1450MHz of the stock part. As per all GTS parts, external power comes via the usual 6-pin PCI Express connector.

With this board already shipping with an overclocked core, it's often the case that there isn't much more to squeeze out of a graphics card when it comes to additional overclocking. Starting off with the core clock speed, we found ourselves with little room for manoeuvre, only managing to squeeze an extra 10MHz out of our sample, to reach a final clock speed of 730MHz. The 256MB of memory on-board was a little more fruitful in the sense of overclocking, as we garnered another 72MHz out of this aspect of the board to reach a stable overclock of 2072MHz.

In relation to the factory overclocked GeForce 8600 GT board we took a look at from Galaxy quite recently, the GeForce 8600 GTS board really looks rather conservative in comparison with regard to its clock speed increases. The lack of a memory overclock on the board is a real shame, and the core clock speed increase perhaps isn't as much as we would like to have seen. Given the impressive looking Zalman cooler attached to the G84 core which powers this board, you can't help but feel that perhaps a little more could have been accomplished, as our overclocking results suggested.

Thus, as always with a factory overclocked part, we're left with the simple question, is it worth the extra outlay? At a recommended retail price just shy of $230, and with some other NVIDIA partners offering equal or better overclocks for a similar price at this particular point in time, then I would have to say no. That isn't to say that Galaxy's offering is a poor choice, but between its smallish clock increases over a reference board and the offerings of other partners if you shop around, it probably wouldn't be my first port of call if you're in the market for a GeForce 8600 GTS graphics board either.