Gigabyte GeForce 8600GTS 256MB

Performance:

With the Silent-Pipe III attached, our hopes for a great overclock on this 8600GTS graphics card were set high. Using CoolBits through the NVIDIA settings panel with the 169.04 Beta driver, we were easily able to push the graphics card to 690/1045MHz (core/memory) from its 675/1000MHz reference frequency. It was a modest overclock, but with the G86 die hovering around 70°C when running stock, temperature was a limiting factor.

For benchmarking, we had compared the Gigabyte GeForce 8600GTS to the previously reviewed ASUS GeForce 8600GT 256MB, Gigabyte GeForce 8500GT 256MB, and on the ATI side was an ASUS Radeon HD 2600PRO 256MB. On the NVIDIA side, we used the 169.04 beta driver while on the ATI side was Catalyst 7.11. With these four graphics cards we turned to our octal-core system that is made up of two Intel Xeon E5320 processors, 4GB of DDR2-533 FB-DIMM RAM, Corsair TX750 PSU, Seagate 300GB Serial ATA 2.0 hard drive, and Tyan Tempest i5000XT motherboard.

Our Linux graphics benchmarks had consisted of Quake 4 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. Unfortunately, the Unreal Tournament 3 Linux client is still unavailable. The test system was running Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon.