Today we have the opportunity to take a look at the MSI GeForce 8600 GT. The graphics card market is one of the more fierce markets in the computer industry. AMD, which now owns ATI, and NVIDIA both pour millions into developing a core to try and top the other. Being just a little bit better could mean the difference between a market killer and going back to the drawing boards. In this article we will see if NVIDIA's latest video card has what it takes. This generation had some complex programming for the new DirectX 10. The engineers not only had to program and develop a core for DirectX 10 but also had to make it work well with DirectX 9.0c which is supported by the GeForce 8600 core. - Dev Hardware

MSI GeForce 8600 GT 256MB OC Edition Card Review

NVIDIA's top of the line GPU, the GeForce 8800 series, has 128 stream processors. You would think that the next level would have been half that, 64 stream processors. Unfortunately divide that in half again and you get 32, which is what the GeForce 8600 GPU has in it. DirectX 10 is a big step forward. Previously, video cards had vertex and pixel pipelines for rendering the game. This would leave the pipeline that isn't being fully worked doing nothing while another may be backlogged with work. DirectX 10 was made to prevent this by unifying this process, also know as unified shader technology.

There are a few things we would like to point out. First, the card is red. This makes it look more like an ATI card than NVIDIA's traditional green PCB. The next big thing we noticed was the cooler. It's copper and looks like it will provide better cooling than the stock cooler. More cooling is always a good thing in our books. The last point is that we see no additional power plugs. It's still nice to see that some decent graphics cards don't require more power than PCI Express can give. This will make power supplies all over a little happier, and does put a bit less stress on the system power requirements.

This card comes overclocked out of the box. The reference core runs at 540MHz, while the core on the MSI GeForce 8600 GT OC edition is bumped up to 580MHz. The memory is clocked at a blazing 1600MHz, that's an extra 200MHz compared to the reference clocks. This card has 256MB of GDDR3 memory on it. This is a good amount for this card. Any less and it would be starve, any more would be wasted. Save more memory for the top of the line. We see low-end cards with lots of memory on them, which is more of a marketing scheme than for performance reasons.

The GeForce 8600 GT is a very capable card. It delivers a really nice bang for the buck for a mid level card. The MSI GeForce 8600 GT OC edition is a great card to get if you arre in the market for a new graphics cards. The perk over any of the reference cards is that it has higher stock clocks. These small gains might not account for much, but there is some small increase. If this card and a reference clocked card cost the same, why not get this one? The GeForce 8 series from NVIDIA were the first to support DirectX 10. This will offer big perks in the future over previous generation cards.

Remarkably this card doesn't require any additional power which is a real perk for people that want an energy efficient computer. What makes this a solid buy to us is the fact that this card costs roughly the same as any other GeForce 8600 GT and you get the additional perk of having it clocked slightly higher than its counter parts. For this reason we feel that the MSI GeForce 8600 GT OC edition deserves extra credit and recognition.