NVIDIA unveiled its GeForce 8600 family back in the middle of April and in typical fashion, the graphics chip designer's add-in board partners announced a slew of pre-overclocked GeForce 8600 series products. One company that has a reputation for offering some of the fastest factory overclocked NVIDIA graphics cards is XFX, today we have a look at the company's second fastest GeForce 8600 GT, the XFX GeForce 8600 GT XXX Edition. Despite the cards name, there's no chance of pornographic content appearing on these pages. Well, there might be some graphics porn, but there aren't going to be any scantily-clad women unfortunately, we are sorry to disappoint on that front. - Bit-Tech

XFX GeForce 8600 GT 256MB XXX Video Card Review

The XFX GeForce 8600 GT XXX Edition shares the same artwork theme as the company's other GeForce 8 series graphics cards, although this time the company has used the hog's dog tags on the heatsink cover. The card itself comes clocked at 620MHz core, 1355MHz on the shader and is rounded off with 256MB of GDDR3 running at 1600MHz effective. It follows NVIDIA's reference design fairly closely, including the cooling solution, although XFX has opted to dye the card's PCB matt black, which looks, quite frankly, awesome. It's a single slot cooling solution that looks quite familiar.

Being a member of the GeForce 8600 family, XFX's GeForce 8600 GT XXX Edition is based on NVIDIA's G84 graphics chip, which is quite a heavily cut-down version of the flagship G80 graphics processing unit. In terms of shader horsepower, the G84 features 32 stream processors, which are arranged in two clusters of 16, this compares to the 128 stream processors arranged into eight clusters of 16 in G80. Most NVIDIA board partners have opted for Samsung memory chips on their GeForce 8600 GT cards, but interestingly XFX has equipped its XXX Edition with Qimonda GDDR3 memory chips rated to 1.4ns.

After a few hours of tweaking, we managed to get XFX's GeForce 8600 GT XXX Edition running stable at 685MHz core, 1512MHz on the shader clock and 1736MHz effective on the memory. At higher GPU clocks, the driver would crash and reset itself and at higher memory clocks, we suffered from a lot of tearing in all of the games we ran. These clock speed increases are impressive to say the least, especially considering the fact that we've managed to get the core speed higher than NVIDIA's GeForce 8600 GTS, which requires a power connector. And, XFX doesn't appear to be clocking the GPU to its maximum frequency.

Despite the lack of HDCP support in the current version, XFX's GeForce 8600 GT XXX Edition is probably one of the best bang for buck mid-range DirectX 10 graphics cards out there. From as little as $175, the card delivers performance that is not too far off NVIDIA's GeForce 8600 GTS and, with a bit of overclocking, you can achieve practically the same performance as the GeForce 8600 GTS. The cheapest GeForce 8600 GTS out there today will cost you around $220, which is another $40 more than the XFX GeForce 8600 GT XXX Edition, which might not be worth the extra money.

This, of course, is providing you want DirectX 10 support in many of the titles that are coming out this year. If DirectX 10 doesn't really bother you, then you could certainly argue that the Radeon X1950 PRO is still a solid buy, but in the more recent game titles, the XFX manages to stand up to it pretty well. For those that want to eventually use a card like this for HD DVD or Blu-ray playback, you're going to have to look elsewhere. However, as a card purely for gaming, XFX's GeForce 8600 GT XXX Edition pretty good value, as it brings reasonably good performance and DirectX 10 support to the table at an affordable price point.