Today we continue our coverage of mid-range video card products with a look at the latest offering from Club3D. A passively cooled GeForce 8600 GT with 512MB of DDR2 memory. In our prior view on the GeForce 8600 GT series we found that it can offer an excellent price performance balance and is capable of handling the latest games at lower resolution without much issue. The GeForce 8600 GT card can be had in all kind of flavors these days with all the manufacturers going the extra mile to make their offer stand apart. The Club3D sample is fitted with a large heatsink and has no fan installed, its primary market is the home theatre PC user who wants to add more GPU power. - Madshrimps

Club3D GeForce 8600 GT 512MB Video Board Review

Club3D equipped their card with DDR2 chips for a total of 512MB, while the GPU clock speeds and shader clock remain identical to the reference specifications. The average price for this passively cooled PCI Express video card is around €110 in shops, which is only a fraction more as the reference card. For more than a year now Club3D is shipping their cards in compact box, only slightly larger than the card inside, no overly crowded front either, only useful information for the end user to see what's inside. The back is more traditional, listing all the NVIDIA features and showing a photo of the video card.

The Club3D GeForce 8600 GT proved itself as a capable mid-range gaming card in our gaming benchmarks, although we question their choice for putting 512MB DDR2 on there instead of 256MB GDDR3 memory, while the performance difference between them is minima. The 512MB on the card only showed its usefulness in one or two occasions. The real selling point of the Club3D GeForce 8600 GT however is not the amount of memory or the custom design PCB, but their choice of heatsink, the unit is completely passively cooled and this scores very high as most reference cards come with noisy cooling solutions.

Price wise the Club3D card scores well, available for around €110 in online stores it's cheaper than buying a reference GeForce 8600 GT card and installing a passive cooling yourself. With its HDTV out capabilities and no noise cooling this GeForce 8600 GT from Club3D will certainly make the shortlist if you're in the market for a home theatre PC friendly product which doesn't cost too much and still allows you to run the occasional game, be it a new one released this year or last year.