XFX GeForce 8600 GTS

This midrange Direct X 10 graphics card will surely bring a broad smile to

the face of many budget conscious gamers who till now couldn't afford to buy the

high end Direct X 10 cards. XFX 8600 GTS is based on the GeForce 8600 GT

chipset. It has the conventional 256 MB DDR3 RAM with slightly over clocked core

speed of 730 MHz and a memory speed of 2.26 GHz. It comes loaded with NVIDIA

PureVideo technology which enables all HD video processing to be done by the GPU.

This new video engine can decode all Blu-ray and HD-DVD content, and also

provide HD video playback up to a resolution of 1080p. It supports SLI, HDTV,

Dual DVI etc and also has additional support for HDCP.

In our tests, it performed very well scoring 5951 in 3D Mark06 (at 1280x1024

resolution). In some of the games like Fear with an fps of 82 (at maximum

setting, i.e. at 1280x1024 with AA-4x and AF-16x) it even outperformed some high

end cards such as ATI Radeon X1950 XTX. Even in games like FAR CRY, Doom 3,

Brain Lara Cricket 2007 and STALKER, it proved to be a great performer.

With Direct X 10 games having already started to hit the market, this card

will surely be a hot property, but for now when HDCP use is not very popular,

paying 5k extra just for it, isn't a good idea.

Bottomline: The XFX GeForce 8600 GT is a similar performing card,

at a much cheaper price.