The mainstream market is now becoming more and more competitive. It is in this market that major manufacturers make their money. The more affordable a product, the more the consumers will buy it and therefore boosting profits. You know as well as I do, that enthusiast products not only looks great, but also producing great performance and results. However, it is not always everyday that consumers can afford such a product, and with this in mind manufacturers have come up with an alternative. Why not take an affordable mainstream product and increase and boost its performance. Many manufacturers have already done this, and we've seen a lot of products on the market. - CPU3D

MSI GeForce 8600 GTS OC 256MB Video Card Review

And especially graphics cards with overclocked GPU cores, higher speed memory and enhanced cooling. This makes a lot of sense if you think about it. A high-end graphics card like the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX would set you back $500-550, while a more affordable mainstream card would cost in the region of $175-200... That's less than half of a high-end card, so do the math. Okay, a mainstream card may not produce the same kind of results or performance as a high-end card, but what it does offer is the support for the latest technologies such as DirectX 10. Affordability and compatibility also counts.

NVIDIA has done very well this year, releasing their G80 series of GPU's and its variants. They were the first to produce a graphics card that fully supports DirectX 10 with drivers supporting Windows Vista. We got this time the MSI GeForce 8600 GTS OC edition in our hands, based on NVIDIA's GeForce 8600 GTS and is equipped with 256MB of GDDR3 memory. It has full support for DirectX 10, and through the ForceWare drivers it also support both Windows XP and Vista. What makes this card so different, is that it uses an overclocked G84 GPU running at 700MHz. It also features a powerful heatsink and fan to cool the GPU.

After testing the MSI GeForce 8600 GTS OC edition, we thought it performed very well considering it's a card aimed at the mainstream user rather than for enthusiasts. Featuring an overclocked NVIDIA G84 GPU running at 700MHz, along with some fast Samsung GDDR3 memory chips, the card is more than capable to handle most of the graphics intensive applications and games available out there. However, we must emphasise that this card is not aimed at the enthusiasts, so we can't really compare the performace against a Radeon HD 2900 XT or a GeForce 8800 GTX for that matter.

NVIDIA have really taken the market by storm, fully exploiting the void that ATI left when they failed to deliver their latest GPU on time. Not all is lost, ATI have finally released their high-end Radeon HD 2900 XT a few months ago and recently, the Radeon HD 2600 XT which is aimed at the mainstream market. Current cost is approximately $225, which we think is correctly priced. The MSI GeForce 8600 GTS OC is a decent graphics card that's ideal for the cost conscience gamer. It may not offer the best performance, but it does offer that little bit extra over the standard GeForce 8600 GTS version.