XFX GeForce 8600GTS XXX

Zitat

So, two questions, what do we think of nVidia’s new GeForce 8600GTS and what do we think about the XFX XXX incarnation. From what a bit of research has shown us, the XFX XXX version is going to be the fastest GeForce 8600GTS graphics card on the market and this is of course going to come with the typical price premium. Before we get too much into that though, let’s just have a quick look at the 8600GTS on the whole.

By the end of my benchmarking, I was slightly disappointed –not sure if I should expect more or what but the 8600GTS just didn’t “wow” me like I thought it would. When thinking about it for longer, I came to the simple conclusion that the 8600GTS didn’t “wow” me because of the huge amount of graphics cards we test. You become so use to hitting the “benchmark” button on 3DMark06, then turning back 10 minutes later and seeing a score in excess of 10000 marks and then you see something under it and lose excitement about the lower performing product.

[...]The lowest resolution I use on a day to day basis is 1920 x 1200 and more often than not I’m sitting in front of 2560 x 1500 but I’m part of a minority. If everyone had 24” and 30” screens, we wouldn’t need a low and mid-range VGA market. nVidia’s GeForce 8600GTS is designed for users of 22” monitors and lower - 1680 x 1050, 1600 x 1200 and 1280 x 1024 are going to be the resolution of choice with this product and should offer fairly decent performance even in DX10 gaming titles.

We’ve established that the actual 8600GT chip design from nVidia is great but what about XFX and their further refinements? XFX has also done a fantastic job - out of the box clock speeds are simply fantastic. They offer huge gains in performance over the standard clocked version and to the best of our knowledge XFX is offering the highest clock speed out of any nVidia partner. XFX seemed to have gone right to the edge with the XXX edition - only a jump of a few MHz on the core would result in a screen full of artifacts. Is this the limit of the 8600GTS, period?