ASUS continuing its tradition of releasing overclocked products, has released a NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS with higher clock speeds, aiming for the highest possible performance a user can get in this category. In this article, we will examine what you can expect from the ASUS Extreme N8600 GTS TOP, with both synthetic benchmarks and real-life gaming experience. More over, we add several new DirectX 10 games, since the GeForce 8600 series supports the upcoming titles that promise to rock your gaming world. The main advantage with the TOP edition is however being a pre-overclocked graphics card with full warranty from ASUS on those higher clock speeds. - CDRInfo

ASUS Extreme N8600 GTS TOP Edition Card Review

The NVIDIA GeForce 8 series graphics processing units redefine the PC gaming experience. With a revolutionary unified architecture and full support for DirectX 10 games, these GeForce 8 series GPU's deliver unprecedented performance, extraordinarily detailed environments, and film quality game effects. The ASUS Extreme N8600 GTS TOP features 256MB of memory, a core clock of 745MHz and a memory frequency of 2.29GHz. That's quite higher frequencies for both the core and memory clock speeds compared with the generic GeForce 8600 GTS graphics cards, which should give it a bit extra performance.

The retail package clearly shows off the faster performance users can expect from their Extreme N8600 GTS TOP. The card is normal length, and reminds us of the GeForce 7900 GS series. The cooling system is made out of copper and covers both the GPU core and memory banks. At full load, the fan tend to be a little noisy. The card offers two DVI and one TV-out outputs. HDCP is supported and you can output HD content to your TV or monitor. Next to that SLI technology is available for multi-GPU operation and the GeForce 8600 GTS requires an additional 6-pin power to work properly.

There is always a way to improve the performance of your system by overclocking it. The ASUS Extreme N8600 GTS TOP is already overclocked compared with NVIDIA's GeForce 8600 GTS reference board, by 70MHz for core and 145MHz for memory. We were curious to see if the card could handle even more overclocking. Using RivaTuner Final, we reached 780MHz for core and 1193MHz for memory. We didn't expect much overclocking space from the Extreme N8600 GTS TOP and we only managed a minor gain. Therefore, with an already highly overclocked card, overclocking is not suggested.

ASUS' support for NVIDIA comes with the release of an overclocked GeForce 8600 GTS based product, the Extreme N8600 GTS TOP that has higher performance than reference based GTS cards. The GeForce 8600 series fully supports DirectX 10 geometry shaders, offering superb visual quality, when of course the game supports it. The performance of the ASUS Extreme N8600 GTS TOP was a mixed bag since in several games, it didn't perform any better than the GeForce 7900 GS or Radeon X1950 PRO cards. With the DirectX 10 games, the performance was mediocre.

The card supports HDCP output so we can consider it as a futureproof buy. The only question is how much would you spend for an ASUS Extreme N8600 GTS TOP. We found the card available at online stores for $275, when an ASUS Extreme N7900 GS TOP costs only $190. On the other hand, an ASUS Extreme N8800 GTS 320MB costs around $330, which is obviously a better priced product for middle to hardcore gamers. We can see a good market for the ASUS Extreme N8600 GTS TOP, but only if the price was much lower, with a clear price gap from the GeForce 8800 series...