Zotac is a company that we've given a bit of coverage since the company officially launched itself at this year's Computex tradeshow. However, unlike some of the new additions to NVIDIA's extensive list of board partners, Zotac is going about things slightly differently. Instead of potentially upsetting the other players in the NVIDIA based graphics card market with low prices like some of the newer partners, it is trying deliver products that aren't just another slew of reference designs. After all, we've already got enough of those on the market and thankfully Zotac acknowledges that fact. Despite being a relatively new player in the market, Zotac also has huge manufacturing power behind it. - Bit-Tech

Zotac GeForce 8600 GT 256MB ZONE Edition Review

The last Zotac graphics card we checked was part of the company's AMP! family, which is focused on pumping up the clock speeds, offering something over and above the NVIDIA reference design from that standpoint. In the process, Zotac says in that it pushes the clock speeds as high as possible without compromising on quality or stability. As always though, there's another side to the coin and in Zotac's case, this is the ZONE family. This series of cards move away from NVIDIA's reference designs in the opposite direction, moving the focus to silence and home theatre capabilities.

The box is small and many would consider it to be a pretty insignificant part of the product, but it's important that your graphics card arrives in one piece, there's nothing worse than something being damaged during transit from both perspectives. The bundled extras are packed in a separate compartment to the card and the latter is tightly sandwiched between two pieces of densely packed corrugated cardboard inside an anti-static bag. We would like to see some thicker cardboard used for the box, but in all honesty, the card is secure and unlikely to be smashed around enough to damage it during transit.

The first thing on Zotac's GeForce 8600 GT ZONE that grabs you is the massive fanless heatsink that almost covers the whole card. Being a passively cooled graphics card, it's no surprise that Zotac has chosen to leave the card running at NVIDIA's reference clock speeds of 540MHz core, 1180MHz on the shader and 1400MHz effective for the memory. After all, the ZONE series is not designed with performance at the helm; instead cards in the family are designed for silence and their home theatre capabilities, although still featuring the SLI connector for dual-GPU operation.

Despite the fact the card is passively cooled, we managed to get Zotac's GeForce 8600 GT ZONE Edition running quite happily up at 587MHz core and 1578MHz on the memory after a bit of tinkering. This was without any additional airflow over the graphics card on our open test bench and is a testament to the heatsink's design. With that said we do recommend that, if you're considering this graphics card, you make sure your case has adequate cooling and good airflow inside it. This will help to ensure you're not going encounter thermal throttling problems, either at stock, or when the card is overclocked.

We guess if you're after a mainstream graphics card with a good set of home theatre features and respectable performance in both DirectX 9.0C and DirectX 10 games, Zotac's card looks to be a better purchase than the Radeon HD 2600 XT, but it's a bit expensive for our tastes at the moment. You could say Zotac's GeForce 8600 GT ZONE Edition is a jack of all trades, master of none at its current price.