Gigabyte GeForce 8600GT 256MB

While the GV-NX86T256D has a 60MHz increase in the core clock and 500MHz improvement in the GDDR3 memory, we were able to push this NVIDIA graphics card even further. The maximum frequency we had arrived at while maintaining stability was a 720MHz core clock and 1700MHz memory clock. Pushing the graphics card beyond this point would result in instability, but this Gigabyte 8600GT graphics card had overclocked remarkably well considering the reference frequencies.

For our testing we had run the Gigabyte GeForce 8600GT 256MB (GV-NX86T256D) at its factory and overclocked speeds and compared it to the previously-reviewed Gigabyte 8500GT 256MB as well as to the ATI Radeon X1950PRO 256MB and using the fglrx 8.39.4 display driver. For testing we had used Fedora 7 with the Linux 2.6.21 kernel and X server 1.3.0. The hardware maintained throughout the testing process was dual Intel Xeon E5320 quad-core processors, 4GB of Kingston DDR2-533 FB-DIMM memory, Tyan Tempest i5000XT motherboard, Seagate 80GB 7200.10 320GB HDD, and a SilverStone Olympia OP650.

While the 8600GT is backed by Silent-Pipe II, when running the graphics card at its factory frequencies this card was very warm to the touch. When overclocked, the graphics card would be in excess of 75°C inside the SilverStone Temjin TJ09 chassis while the die would idle at roughly 65°C. The benchmarks we had used in this article were Enemy Territory, Doom 3, Quake 4, and SPECViewPerf. We had used the NVIDIA 100.14.11 Linux display driver in this article, which as we shared in our Linux versus Windows comparison, is at a disadvantage when it comes to the frame-rate performance.