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Power Consumption and Noise
While the G80 is a power hog, the 8600 GTS power usage is noticeably more efficient. Even with 289 million transistors, the G84 is only a small notch above the X1950 Pro and 7900 GS. If you look below that spec sheet, you'll see that the recommended power supply has a minimum requirement of 350W. Seeing how most card nowadays suggest 450W or higher, I'd say that the low power usage is bright spot for the 8600 GTS.
The fan used in the 8600 GTS XXX is typical of cards of this size and performance level. While we didn't take any measurements with our sound meter, subjectively we found the noise to be on par with ATI's X1950PRO and other cards using similar fan designs. You definitely will notice this card on bootup (as is typical), but even when it settles down in Windows you will probably notice it slightly. Those interested in absolute silence and for HTPC applications should take note that Gigabyte has announced completely silent editions of the 8600.
XFX modified Double Lifetime Warranty
Most of you already know of XFX's famous Double Lifetime Warranty, which essentially allows you to pass your card to a second owner and allow them to keep the warranty intact. With this launch XFX has modified the wording of its warranty to essentially open the doors for overclockers and anyone who wants to swap out the fan, a move that EVGA did a short while ago. Essentially XFX's warranty will now cover your card as long as there are no physical alterations or physical damage to the card. This rules out volt mods and soddering jobs, but swapping out a fan is a fairly non-invasive mod that from here on out will not void your warranty. That's pretty cool.
Final Thoughts
NVIDIA's pricing plan for their video cards has teetered on the realm of self-cannibalism in the past. Yet from the 66xx to the current 88xx GeFORCE series, hundreds of Nvidia cards were concocted by adding a multitude of affixes to the series' name. Despite that the resulting video cards would have minimal cost differences, sometimes within $10 to $15, this scheme has worked quite well for NVIDIA. The key to making everything work for NVIDIA was that each newer series had to be better than the last. And the consumers ate it up, arguably pushing NVIDIA past its competitors.
The G80 core dominated the high-end market, but I believe it's unlikely that the new G86 and G84 will do the same for their respective classes in the short term. The new 8600 GTS' major weak point right now would be the crippling 128-bit memory bus and reduced stream processors (32 from the 8800 GTS' 96). Add this to the fact that the mid-range market, where the 8600 GTS supposedly will fit in, already has a glut of video cards including two of the 79xx cards. NVIDIA has been known in the past to quickly knock down the price of new products, but seeing how they are also releasing the 8600 GT and 8500 GT in addition to the readily available 79xx series, there isn't much room for price staggering.
There is potential in the 8600 GTS and 8600 GT though when given its new PureVideo HD processing and thanks to NVIDIA's trick card: DX10. With the G84 architecture, integrated HDCP is standard and all of the HD-DVD / BLU-RAY processing will go through the video card instead of the CPU. This HD-DVD/BLU-RAY support by NVIDIA is a brilliant move that is sure to attract home theater enthusiasts. We think this topic is worth further consideration as it seems NVIDIA has made good on a very astute observation that gamers buying $99-200 cards may not want to have their CPU usage pegged at ungodly usage levels when watching next generation content.
We mentioned that the card may have limited impact in the short term, but that's dependent on just how quickly actual DX10 titles make it to market and how much of an effect hype will have on consumers. NVIDIA is still the ONLY player in town when it comes to DX10 support and now that support extends to every price point of the market. That alone is a huge marketing boon for them and massive achievement that should be saluted. Right now the unofficial word is that 10-12 DX10 titles will be out between now and October 2007, so it's hard to believe believe anyone buying a card in 4-5 months will be looking at anything other than a DX10 card. Some better known titles to hit shelves this year will include:
Company of Heroes (DX 10 patch) - May 07
FPS Creator - May 07
Lost Planet - June 07
EVE Online (DX 10 patch) - Mid 07
Hellgate London - Mid 07
Age of Conan - Late summer
Flight Sim X (DX 10 patch) - Fall 07
BioShock - Fall 07
World in Conflict - Late 07
Unreal Tournament 3 - Q4 07
Crysis - Sometime this year ;)
Remember the days when ATI fanboys were making fun of NVIDIA for being behind in the race to support DX9 and sales were tipping in favor of the Radeon 9700 cards? Well the tables have turned.
Admittedly while the 8600 GTS didn't perform well during benchmarking, the drivers we used were actually still in beta, so perhaps further refinement for the drivers can help to prop up the 8600 GTS some (all of us have seen this time and again in the past 7 years). However as it stands now, this new release from NVIDIA can be deemed mildly disappointing for gamers lusting for raw performance. The expectations for more affordable cards running the G80-based GPUs were very high, but the 8600 GTS just can't live up to them fully because of its underwhelming graphical capabilities. The cards we tested against in this review are priced similarly to the 8600 GTS XXX edition, though the 7950GT is still selling for a slight premium. If you already own something in the 7600GT to the ATI X1800 XT performance range we just can't recommend an "upgrade" to the 8600 GTS. Instead, we would urge you to consider spending extra money on an 8800 GTS 320MB which is listing for as low as $279. However, if you currently own a 6600GT class card or ATI's X1600 class card and are considering an cost effective upgrade for DX10 gaming, suddenly the new 8600GTS and 8600GT cards begin to make more sense. The 8600 GT especially, with stock prices at $149, make a solid choice for midrange DX10 "bang for your buck", and we'll be taking a look at that in more detail shortly. Improved graphics quality, full CSAA support, superior AF quality, DX10, and fully accelerated PureVideo HD make this a logical choice for mainstream gamers who want pave the way to DX10 gaming with a modest speed bump, and in that situation an overclocked XFX XXX edition with XFX's more overclocker and modder friendly warranty policies is appealing indeed.
While the G80 is a power hog, the 8600 GTS power usage is noticeably more efficient. Even with 289 million transistors, the G84 is only a small notch above the X1950 Pro and 7900 GS. If you look below that spec sheet, you'll see that the recommended power supply has a minimum requirement of 350W. Seeing how most card nowadays suggest 450W or higher, I'd say that the low power usage is bright spot for the 8600 GTS.
The fan used in the 8600 GTS XXX is typical of cards of this size and performance level. While we didn't take any measurements with our sound meter, subjectively we found the noise to be on par with ATI's X1950PRO and other cards using similar fan designs. You definitely will notice this card on bootup (as is typical), but even when it settles down in Windows you will probably notice it slightly. Those interested in absolute silence and for HTPC applications should take note that Gigabyte has announced completely silent editions of the 8600.
XFX modified Double Lifetime Warranty
Most of you already know of XFX's famous Double Lifetime Warranty, which essentially allows you to pass your card to a second owner and allow them to keep the warranty intact. With this launch XFX has modified the wording of its warranty to essentially open the doors for overclockers and anyone who wants to swap out the fan, a move that EVGA did a short while ago. Essentially XFX's warranty will now cover your card as long as there are no physical alterations or physical damage to the card. This rules out volt mods and soddering jobs, but swapping out a fan is a fairly non-invasive mod that from here on out will not void your warranty. That's pretty cool.
Final Thoughts
NVIDIA's pricing plan for their video cards has teetered on the realm of self-cannibalism in the past. Yet from the 66xx to the current 88xx GeFORCE series, hundreds of Nvidia cards were concocted by adding a multitude of affixes to the series' name. Despite that the resulting video cards would have minimal cost differences, sometimes within $10 to $15, this scheme has worked quite well for NVIDIA. The key to making everything work for NVIDIA was that each newer series had to be better than the last. And the consumers ate it up, arguably pushing NVIDIA past its competitors.
The G80 core dominated the high-end market, but I believe it's unlikely that the new G86 and G84 will do the same for their respective classes in the short term. The new 8600 GTS' major weak point right now would be the crippling 128-bit memory bus and reduced stream processors (32 from the 8800 GTS' 96). Add this to the fact that the mid-range market, where the 8600 GTS supposedly will fit in, already has a glut of video cards including two of the 79xx cards. NVIDIA has been known in the past to quickly knock down the price of new products, but seeing how they are also releasing the 8600 GT and 8500 GT in addition to the readily available 79xx series, there isn't much room for price staggering.
There is potential in the 8600 GTS and 8600 GT though when given its new PureVideo HD processing and thanks to NVIDIA's trick card: DX10. With the G84 architecture, integrated HDCP is standard and all of the HD-DVD / BLU-RAY processing will go through the video card instead of the CPU. This HD-DVD/BLU-RAY support by NVIDIA is a brilliant move that is sure to attract home theater enthusiasts. We think this topic is worth further consideration as it seems NVIDIA has made good on a very astute observation that gamers buying $99-200 cards may not want to have their CPU usage pegged at ungodly usage levels when watching next generation content.
We mentioned that the card may have limited impact in the short term, but that's dependent on just how quickly actual DX10 titles make it to market and how much of an effect hype will have on consumers. NVIDIA is still the ONLY player in town when it comes to DX10 support and now that support extends to every price point of the market. That alone is a huge marketing boon for them and massive achievement that should be saluted. Right now the unofficial word is that 10-12 DX10 titles will be out between now and October 2007, so it's hard to believe believe anyone buying a card in 4-5 months will be looking at anything other than a DX10 card. Some better known titles to hit shelves this year will include:
Company of Heroes (DX 10 patch) - May 07
FPS Creator - May 07
Lost Planet - June 07
EVE Online (DX 10 patch) - Mid 07
Hellgate London - Mid 07
Age of Conan - Late summer
Flight Sim X (DX 10 patch) - Fall 07
BioShock - Fall 07
World in Conflict - Late 07
Unreal Tournament 3 - Q4 07
Crysis - Sometime this year ;)
Remember the days when ATI fanboys were making fun of NVIDIA for being behind in the race to support DX9 and sales were tipping in favor of the Radeon 9700 cards? Well the tables have turned.
Admittedly while the 8600 GTS didn't perform well during benchmarking, the drivers we used were actually still in beta, so perhaps further refinement for the drivers can help to prop up the 8600 GTS some (all of us have seen this time and again in the past 7 years). However as it stands now, this new release from NVIDIA can be deemed mildly disappointing for gamers lusting for raw performance. The expectations for more affordable cards running the G80-based GPUs were very high, but the 8600 GTS just can't live up to them fully because of its underwhelming graphical capabilities. The cards we tested against in this review are priced similarly to the 8600 GTS XXX edition, though the 7950GT is still selling for a slight premium. If you already own something in the 7600GT to the ATI X1800 XT performance range we just can't recommend an "upgrade" to the 8600 GTS. Instead, we would urge you to consider spending extra money on an 8800 GTS 320MB which is listing for as low as $279. However, if you currently own a 6600GT class card or ATI's X1600 class card and are considering an cost effective upgrade for DX10 gaming, suddenly the new 8600GTS and 8600GT cards begin to make more sense. The 8600 GT especially, with stock prices at $149, make a solid choice for midrange DX10 "bang for your buck", and we'll be taking a look at that in more detail shortly. Improved graphics quality, full CSAA support, superior AF quality, DX10, and fully accelerated PureVideo HD make this a logical choice for mainstream gamers who want pave the way to DX10 gaming with a modest speed bump, and in that situation an overclocked XFX XXX edition with XFX's more overclocker and modder friendly warranty policies is appealing indeed.
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Maybe Nvidia will suffer the same consequences as ATI has in the past. ATI were the first to release DX9 and it has never been seen by a large portion of people to have always been a step behind Nvidia. Now they seem to have jumped the gun and now they may perpetually be a step behind ATI for the DX10 hardware future. Remember first out the gate doesn't always mean first to the finish line.
So i say this if you can, wait until ATI has released there DX10 card and then compare the 2 and buy the best, but until then be happy playing your DX9 games as at least on the current DX9 hardware you will get good performance and your money's worth.
DX10 is the future of gaming but i will not buy in to it unless i can be 100% sure that i'm getting my money's worth, and not forced into buying second rate hardware because a company knows i will eventually have to buy.
David Lane
I wish it was possible to make a reasonable prediction on when DX10 becomes necessary for gamers, Crysis is the only DX10 compatible game I can think off for now. I would assume DX10 doesn't become a must for another year or so, maybe I should stick to DX9 for now and go DX10 for Christmas or something along those lines. Either way, I'm going to wait and see what ATI comes up with, this might be the time for me to switch. If not, at least the price will have dropped by than.
I guess I won't be getting this card then.
You can't expect new architecture and ways of rendering things be applied to the old.