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| Galaxy GeForce 8600 GTS Graphics Card |
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Based on the newer and smaller G84 GPU with 32 stream processors running at 1.45GHz and 8 ROPs, the GeForce 8600 GTS comes with 256MB of GDDR3 RAM running at 2GHz DDR. This gives it a texture fill rate of 10,800 megatexels/s and a memory bandwidth of 32GB/s. That's 61% more fill rate and 43% more memory bandwidth than the GeForce 7600 GT. Not bad for a mid-range card. That performance advantage was confirmed in the tests we ran in Windows Vista. The Galaxy GeForce 8600 GTS compared favourably against the GeForce 7950 GT and is generally about 40 % faster than the GeForce 7600 GT. Its DirectX 10 performance has improved a lot since the first time we tested it. In the past, we asked ourselves, "Do we want to play games, or watch slideshows?" With the latest drivers, the Galaxy GeForce 8600 GTS is at least capable of achieving a usable frame rate at 1280 x 1024. However, if you want silky-smooth gameplay, you will need to reduce the resolution and/or the rendering quality. For those who are interested in HD DVD decoding, you will also be happy to know that the GeForce 8600 GTS comes with a new video processor (VP2) that allows the CPU to completely offload the processing of H.264 content to the GeForce 8600 GTS. This means much lower CPU utilization than even the GeForce 8800 GTX, whose VP1 processor can only do motion compensation and deblocking. This card is really great for those who are looking for an upgrade from an old card, like a GeForce 6600 GT or Radeon X800. It offers a huge leap in performance over those older cards. The inclusion of a Zalman VF900-Cu cooler is a big bonus. Not only does this particular cooler perform really well, it is also very quiet. Kudos to Galaxy! The Galaxy GeForce 8600 GTS is also great for those who are just looking for a low-cost graphics card with great DirectX 9 performance. However, if you want to do some serious DirectX 10 gaming at high resolutions and maximum rendering quality, then you would do best with something like the new NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT. For more details, read our Comprehensive Review! |
Even since NVIDIA launched their | MSRP |
• $109 |
| Lowest PriceGrabber Price |
• NA |
| Review |
|
| Manufacturing Process |
• 0.08 Micron |
Transistor Count |
• 289 Million |
DirectX Support |
• 10 |
| Interface |
• PCI Express X16 |
| Stream Processors |
• 32 |
| Vertex Shader Version |
• 4.0 |
| Pixel Shader Version |
• 4.0 |
Textures Per Clock |
• Average 8 |
ROPs |
• 8 |
Core Clock Speed |
• 675 MHz |
| Shader Clock Speed |
• 1450 MHz |
| Fill Rate |
• 10800 MTexels/s |
| Memory Bus Width |
• 128-bits |
Memory Size |
• 256 MB |
| Memory Type |
• GDDR3 |
| Memory Speed |
• 1 GHz (2 GHz DDR) |
Memory Bandwidth |
• 32 GB/s |
DVI Support |
• Two dual-linked DVI, both integrated into the GPU |
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