nVidia 8600 GT - The Card
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The Card
This is your typical graphics card. There are a few things I would like to point out. First, it's red! This makes it look like more of an ATI card than nVidia's traditional green PCB.
The next big thing I noticed was the cooler. It's copper and looks like it will provide better cooling than the stock cooler. More cooling is always an up side in my book.
Dual DVI is becoming the standard here. Any time now, we can hope to see monitors becoming only DVI too.
The last point is that I 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.
This card has 256 MB GDDR3 RAM on it. This is a good amount for this card. Any less and it would be starved; any more and it would be wasted. Save more than that for the top of the line. We see low end cards with lots of memory on them. This is more of a marketing scheme than for performance.
This card comes overclocked out of the box. The reference core runs at 540 MHz, but the core on the MSI NX8600 GT is bumped up to 580 MHz. The RAM is clocked at a blazing 800 MHz; that's an extra 100 MHz compared to the reference clocks.
Next: Overclocking/Testing >>
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