It's been a while since the mid-range G84 hit the market. To be frank, after testing this card I had my doubts of its hierarchy in the community. Regardless the class, these cards along with entry level ones are the actual dough makers. We don't always check out uber-performing graphic cards, neither do we look at many entry-level cards. Mid-range SKU's are fascinating because they shape all kinds of trends for the graphics market, plus they won't cost you an arm and a leg. Leadtek has got quite a few WinFast PX8600 models for you to chose from. The one we have today is located on the bottom of the food chain. It's the entry-level WinFast PX8600 GT board featuring blistering fast DDR2 memory. - Bjorn3D

Leadtek WinFast PX8600 GT 512MB SLI Board Review

The codename for this lovely entry-level GeForce 8600 GT is G84. It is literally the lowest performing GeForce 8600 GT on the planet thus the classification used. As for main features, it resembles G80 in all its glory. The differences lay in the architecture. The G84 is an 80nm process with 289 million transistors onboard. The core comes with 32 stream processors which is the quarter of what G80 offers in terms of shading capabilities. The good thing is, the G84's texturing unit can process eight texture addresses and eight filtering operations per clock, which is slightly optimized and in favor of this small chip.

It comes with no surprise that this PCB is green. Most Leadtek cards are built around reference design, except for special edition cards such as Leviathan. The cooling system however signifies that's been made by Leadtek. In a nutshell, it's quiet and cools the GPU and memory really well. Tere isn't much to say about Leadtek WinFast PX8600 GT, its standard design does not generate much fuzz. It's simplistic without any bells and whistles. The cooling system however is well thought out. Not only it cools the GPU, but it covers memory chips so heat dissipates faster from these areas.

The G84 core has already made friends amongst overclockers. An easy voltage modification results in massive core overclock and major frame improvement. It's quite possible to reach GeForece 8600 GTS clocks and even exceed it. However this Leadtek model sports slow DDR2 memory and bumping up those chips won't get you anywhere. Although we didn't up the voltage of this card it has reached a miserable overclock of 620MHz core and 840MHz effective memory. We strongly suggest getting a GDDR3 model instead if you're planning on overclocking it, as it can hit much higher clock speeds.

We honestly don't know who to recommend such SLI setup. Leadtek has been known for having a bunch of SKU's for its customers. This GeForce 8600 GT is just the example where we can have a nice mid-range chip with old school DDR2 memory. Now that AMD's Radeon HD 3800 series are out, Leadtek should have priced these models more aggressively in case someone plans on bridging them. Although we have not shown scores with SLI disabled, it's nothing to be proud of. Lack of bandwidth is present everywhere where high resolution is used and anti-aliasing is enabled.

Making this long story short, we thought it would be interesting to check out how the two of these can manage against much more powerful and cheaper Radeon HD 3850. Let's not be so pessimistic as these two little GeForce 8600 GT's can do plenty of damage in DirectX 10 games. Priced at $125 green each they won't surpass the Radeon HD 3850 however in either price tag or performance. The SLI is there, but with extra eye candy the scores don't scale well. It's a pitty those DirectX 10 titles don't support anti-aliasing out of the box, it would be interesting to see the performance inside and out.