So you say your system is budget minded? You went out and obtained a system that was minimal as that was all you had at the time for an update. A little on-board video with an AMD processor paired to it, not exactly state of the art, but not old enough to go all out for new right. Could you possibly add a little something, maybe something just shy of $150 to make her compete, make her alive with some gaming tooth? Well we have in our grubby little hands the MSI GeForce 8600 GT Twin Turbo, while not a Porsche, we don't think we should take for granted the current mid-range deliverable, as not all that long ago, we are sure this card would have toppled the best we had. - Viper Lair

MSI GeForce 8600 GT Twin Turbo Video Card Review

As somehow spelled out in the product name, MSI sends this to the end user clocking higher then NVIDIA's specifications. With the standard GeForce 8600 GT GPU coming in at 540MHz and the GDDR3 memory at 1.4GHz, MSI awards its purchasers a nice overclock on the GPU and memory. MSI has also packed their GeForce 8600 GT with the goods, especially considering a mid-range card. Just as most GeForce 7600 GT solutions, the GeForce 8600 GT lineup does not require external power, saving your power supply a little effort. MSI has packaged the card for ease of discernment as well as protection.

First impressions were of minimalistic cooling, as some of the solutions out there have just become cumbersome at best, MSI has done a nice job of making the cooling solution flow with the product instead of overcoming it. While the back side of the GeForce 8600 GT is nothing spectacular, you can see that the cooler MSI deploys is not the snap in variety, this puppy is bolted down. MSI has also included a little button with TT labeled on it, this is your boost button, hence our Twin Turbo moniker. Twin Turbo represents a dual BIOS, and when the TT is off, the card runs at 600MHz. Flip the switch, and the core gets a 20MHz boost.

Obviously, anything you can put into that PCI Express slot to update the on-board video is going to give you a boost, the MSI GeForce 8600 GT Twin Turbo is not only going to do that, its going to do it while keeping those all important big bills in your savings account. NVIDIA has been king of the high-end market space for some time now, and the mid-range has been going their way as well. When they have cards such as the GeForce 8600 GT Twin Turbo being put out by manufacturers such as MSI in this case, its no wonder. A well packaged all around card that won't just give you a great gaming experience.