The Official GF 8600 & 8500 reviews thread

Given more data, I'd like to back-pedal a bit. It seems the 8600GTS is roughly on par with the 7950GT in terms of power draw, different review sites give data to either side, implying that the products are fairly similar in that regard.

 

Having read more reviews, I cant help but get the same feeling when I read X1600 reviews; 30-35% performance increase, good feature list & overpriced. The only difference is that its competition hasnt launched yet.

 

Yeah this part strikes me as what happens in this market whenever the competition is lacking... Just as I'd count on nV to wring ever last $ out of mindshare advantage every chance they get, I'd also count on them to release a followup part whenever AMD gets around to releasing their midrange dx10 parts...

 

http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=637&p=0
They totally blast the card, but I don't know why they have such big performance deficits (vs. 7600GT)

 

That's right. He should have known better and compare the 8600 GT with the 7600 GS.
The standard Nvidia nomenclature system has changed for this generation.

 

Definitely.

And I'll also put the blame partly on AMD for not driving them mad enough.

I wonder when AMD will EOL for RV570, as thats going to cut both 8600 & X2600's (if it has similar performance as 8600) market.

 

True, but let's face it -- this is just a classic attempt to dupe some casual consumers into buying a (relatively) crap card. ATi does it, too, I'm just sayin'.

 

The problem with brick and mortar stores is that they'll happily sell those cards for $400...

 

http://www.penstarsys.com/reviews/video/gigabyte/8600gtssp3/index.html

I tested quite a few different applications and scenarios. I also compared it to the old 7800 GTX. It is quite interesting to see what applications are more pixel and texture fillrate limited, and which ones really hammer on the shaders.

Not quite as impressive as the 7600 GT was for the midrange last year, but I think that this is a slightly underrated chip when looking at a lot of the upcoming titles.

 

But that's excatly it: 6600 and 7600 GT have been a huge success due to "last year's high-end perfromace at midrage prices", which for the first time in 3 years Nvidia failed to deliver on. For the record, I don't expect RV630 to do any better in that regard either.

 

Heh, small correction. The 6600 GT was faster than the previous year's FX 5950... but the 7600 GT was not faster than the previous year's 7800 GTX. But it certainly was faster than the 6800 Ultra preceding the 7800 GTX.

 

LOL, well super-technically 7600 GT came out Q106 while 7800 GTX came out Q205, so exactly a year prior to 7600 GT's release (Q105) 6800 Ultra was the high-end card.

The point still stands though - Nvidia did not deliver up to the expectations they themselves set.

 

Heh, we are splitting hairs a bit. But yes, I believe that most were expecting performance above the level of the 7900 GT and X1950 Pro. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The price of features for DX10 certainly proved to be expensive at 90 nm and 80 nm.

 

It will be interesting to compare one of these little babies to the correspondent AMD brethren once they're all out there.

 

AGP versions are on the way nVidia finished BR02-A05 bridge and vendors are expected to announce AGP products in a few weeks. New HSI bridge should be compatible even with G9x series...

 

Will someone allow me to be lazy and not trawl through a load of reviews
and give us a rough guide how the 8600gt compares to the 7600gt

tnx...

 

The 8600 GT is not the direct replacement for the 7600 GT, confusingly.
It goes something like this:

-7600 GT -> 8600 GTS
-7600 GS -> 8600 GT
-7300 GT -> 8500 GT
-7300 GS -> 8400 GS

I'd say that the 85xx/86xx series is definitively faster and with much better image quality/video processing capabilities than their 73xx/76xx predecessors, but the difference isn't exactly earth-shattering.
For a true next-gen DX10 + DX9 taste, anything below a 8800 GTS 320MB is not really worth it, IMHO. Perhaps this Fall things can be different, though.