System setup and notes
Hardware
| Graphics cards | XFX GeForce 8600 GTS XXX | ECS N8600GTS 256MX+ | Inno3D XStriker3 256MB | XFX GeForce 8600 GT XXX | Inno3D iChiLL 7900GS Arctic Cooling Silencer 6 | ASUS Radeon EAX1950PRO |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shader Model | 4.0 | 3.0 | ||||
| GPU Clock Speed (MHz) | 730 | 720 | 705 | 620 | 550 | 580 |
| Shader Clock Speed (MHz) | 1566 | 1450 | 1450 | 1355 | 550 | 580 |
| Memory Clock Speed (MHz) | 2260 | 2200 | 2100 | 1600 | 1500 | 1404 |
| Memory Bus Width (Bits) | 128 | 256 | ||||
| CPU | Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.40GHz, 4MiB L2 cache, 1066MHz FSB, LGA775) | |||||
| Motherboard | EVGA NF68 (NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI) | ASUS PW5-DH Deluxe (Intel i975X) | ||||
| BIOS revision | 691N0P20 | 1305 | ||||
| Memory | 1GByte (2 x 512MByte) OCZ26671024ELDCGE-K PC5400 | |||||
| Memory timings and speed | 4-4-4-8 @ DDR2-667 | |||||
| Disk drive(s) | 160GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 (3Gb/s mode) | |||||
| Mainboard software | NVIDIA platform driver 9.53 | Intel Inf Update 8.0.1.1002 | ||||
| Graphics driver | ForceWare 158.16 | ForceWare 93.71 | CATALYST 7.1 | |||
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional, w/ SP2, 32-bit | |||||
Software
| 3D Benchmarks |
Far Cry v1.33 Quake 4 v1.30 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05 |
|---|
Notes
The choice of operating system remains with Windows XP Professional. The move to DX10-supporting Windows Vista will occur when there's at least 5 quality DX10 titles available to benchmark.We've got three GeForce 8600 GTS cards and none operate at default frequencies. NVIDIA, it seems, has given its partners free rein to market multiple SKUs are varying speeds. Knowing this, the prudent buyer will peruse the specific card specs before laying down their hard-earned.
Looking further into our comparison, it's a little complex attempting to compare unified superscalar architectures (SM4.0 parts) against vector-based, 'rigid' models (SM 3.0), so we'll let the benchmarks do the talking. What's clear, though, is that the two SM3.0 cards enjoy a huge bandwidth advantage over the 128-bit-equipped G84s in this lineup.
Benchmarks were conducted at 1280x1024 4xAA 8xAF. It's the most likely resolution and image quality setting for midrange cards, especially given that it's the native resolution of many 17- and 19in panels.
Due to the high price of the XFX GeForce 8600 GTS 256MiB card we've also compared it against a recently-reviewed ASUS GeForce 8800 GTS 320 (DX10) and Sapphire Radeon X1950 XTX (DX9). Both high-end cards are available for comfortably less than £200 and should offer far greater performance, thanks to richer architecture. We've benchmarked the same games but used higher-quality settings and raised the resolution to 1920x1200 4xAA 8/16xAF.
As always, we ran each benchmark a trio of times and then calculated the arithmetic mean. If any of the three results looked erroneous, we threw all three away until we could collect three within a margin of statistical error. We report any major attempts needed to get three reliable results, of course. Apart from that, things are as noted on the graphs and in the graph commentary. Want to know more? Head for the HEXUS.community.