Today we give you one more GeForce 8600 GTS card. After learning that ATI's Radeon HD 2600 generation is strong enough to battle GeForce 8600 GT, the popularity of GeForce 8600 GTS cards has risen significantly. However, the truth is that ATI has an older generation of cards, Radeon X1950 PRO that still has enough muscle to defeat the GeForce 8600 GTS in most benchmarks. DirectX 10 support will play a decisive role in this comparison, so many will turn to GeForce 8600 GTS cards in the future. We've seen that the cores of these cards have no trouble in running at speeds greater than default 675MHz, so many NVIDIA partners opted for selling overclocked cards. - Fudzilla

MSI GeForce 8600 GTS OverClocked Edition Review

Well, the MSI GeForce 8600 GTS with the suffix OC clearly shows this is an overclocked card. Our sample card runs at 720MHz core and 2200MHz memory speed. You may be left a little bit baffled if you've already seen or bought an OC version of MSI card, and your card runs at somewhat different speeds from the ones we're testing today. The reason is that we received one of the first samples, from the time when MSI still made decisions about the speed of MSI GeForce 8600 GTS OC edition card. The BIOS is to blame for the core and memory frequencies. All the cards should run at these speeds with no trouble whatsoever.

We've noticed that MSI offers two versions of OC cards, and they differ from one another in cooling. While our sample uses the default NVIDIA cooler, MSI constructed a slightly larger and efficient dual slot cooler. The advantage of MSI cooling is a little more freedom in overclocking, although the NVIDIA cooler also does a decent job. The card has 256MB of 128-bit GDDR3 memory, whereas the shader speed is default 1450MHz. Memory speed is 2200MHz and it is pretty close to the maximum speed we've managed to squeeze out and with full support of Windows Vista operating system and technology.

If you want a DirectX 10 card with good performance, and at the same time cheaper than $220, then a GeForce 8600 GTS is the card for you. Performance is comparable to ATI Radeon X1950 PRO card, but this one is only DirectX 9.0c and it has got no unified shader architecture. If you’re investing into the future and you want to play DirectX 10 games that are about to show up, then the MSI GeForce 8600 GTS OC edition priced at around $200 is a good choice. In the box we've found a full version of the game Company of Heroes, and it definitely raises the value of this card as this is one of the first DirectX 10 games.