Nvidia 8600 series boards released and reviewed

The latest entrant into the DirectX 10 capable arena has arrived with the launch of the nvidia Geforce 8600 series boards. They are set to be followed up by lower end 8500, 8300 and possibly an 8100 series all of which are said to use slower DDR2 memory which will just hamper performance and not make them candidates for gaming cards thus negating the point of DirectX 10 support.

For now the 8600 series can be picked up in two variants, the 8600GT and 8600GTS. A number of sites have received the cards in for review and they are somewhat disappointed in the cards. According to PC Pro, the 8600GT was just a sheer disappointment and while the 8600GTS scored fairly well on a majority of the tests it still couldn’t hold a candle to any of the 8800 series even the 320MB 8800GTS was able to thoroughly trounce both.

They went on to say “The 8800 clearly remains the most future-proof investment.” That is an assessment I agree with. One thing they didn’t really do in their article is take a look at the prices of the 8600GT/GTS as compared to the 8800GTS so I’ll just go ahead and do that.

The 8600GT runs between $170 and $190 with the 8600GTS following in at $200 to $230 in either case it doesn’t really matter because there is little difference between the $170 price tag of the 8600GT and the $260 price tag of the 8800GTS being $90. I know what you’re thinking, $90 could be considered a lot of money but you really are better off saving up for the 8800GTS.

Then there is the 8600GTS with a price difference anywhere between $60 and $30 to the 8800GTS now it would make little sense to buy the 8600GTS with such a small gap in price. My recommendation is to forgo any of the 8600 series and step up to the 8800GTS, even if you have to save the money to do it.

If you think you will be able to get away without plugging any of the 8600 offerings directly into the PCI Express x16 slot without any external power, you would be wrong. The 8600 series just like its bigger 8800 brethren require a 6-pin PCIe power connector in order to run (although power supply requirements are less).

The 8600 cards are also single slot designs so if you are low on space in your case you may want to consider them over the 8800 series as those require the space of two slots (though they only plug into one).

Use the 8600 series if:

There isn’t room in your case for an 8800 series card

Your Power Supply won’t support the use of an 8800 series card

You want to save as much as $90

Use the 8800 series if:

There is room in your case for it

Your Power Supply can power it

You’d rather have the best of the best instead of saving $90 (and why wouldn’t you)

Note, to take full advantage of DirectX 10 you must have Vista installed but that is a double edged sword. While it would enable DirectX 10 support, nvidia still does not have WHQL drivers for Vista, yet. The latest stable beta driver version is Forceware version 158.18. They are getting closer and closer to a final version… but in the meantime here’s hoping they have at least added temperature monitoring.