nVidia 8600 GT - Overclocking/Testing
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Overclocking
This card comes already overclocked above the reference 8600 GT clocks. This should give it a slight bump in results. Seeing that these cards can be found for roughly the same price, we will see if the additional clock speeds will provide any benefit.
Testing
People buy the 8600 GT for gaming, and that is how we will test it. If you are not looking at gaming, you should be looking at a cheaper card. We will test the reference clocks, the stock clocks for this card. We will get to see how well this card does in games and benchmarks, and the difference between the overclocked speeds compared to the reference clock speeds. The test computer is comprised of the following:
3DMark 06
This is the benchmark of benchmarks. Everyone will benchmark different games, but you will always see this benchmark run.
We gained 300 points here. This is what I expected. This is a synthetic benchmark. Any change with the graphic renderings will be quickly noticed here, but may not affect the actual gaming performance. If it does, it probably won't be to the same magnitude as synthetic benchmarks. The rest of the tests are actual games, so the results may differ from this test.
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
Half-Life 2 was a great game, and this was a little present that people got that showed us what they were able to do with Half-Life 2. The Lost Coast offers hi-res textures and also uses High Dynamic Range Lighting.
Our first game shows a slight edge to the overclocked results. Two FPS probably won't even be noticed. At over 100 FPS the difference doesn't matter. Lost Coast is what I like to think of as a preview to what we could see in the next installments of the Half-Life series.
Next: Testing pt.2 >>
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