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ASUS & MSI: GeForce 8600GTS |
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Written by Nebojsa Todorovic
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Tuesday, 17 April 2007 |
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Page 1 of 4 As it usually happens, after introducing high-end chips, NVIDIA is waiting for several months to thrill its potential customers with not so deep pocket. Unwritten rule says that the strongest model from middle segment is approximately one half of the fastest chip from high-end class. Attention should be paid to this, because this time Nvidia deviated from that rule. Namely, it is known that 8800GTX has 384-bit bus, its GPU, G80, has 128 stream processors and 32 ROP.
Upon looking into specs table, one can reach clear conclusion that this unwritten rule was definitely not obeyed this time. Putting all together, latest and fastest mid-class graphics card, 8600GTS, is somewhere between one third and one quarter of GeForce 8800GTX. Reason for this sudden policy change is not quite clear, but it is for sure that we cannot expect mentioned performances. Assumptions were that GeForce 8600GTS will be at the same level with 7900GT in terms of speed, but our hopes were dispersed after seeing characteristics on the paper. Still, G84 chip has all advanced characteristics of its older brothers, which can be treated as its main trump card.
Before everything else, we have support for DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4.0, but PureVideo HD „Engine“, as well, which enables us watching HD video on less powerful computers. Load of processor during watching video files of this type should be minor – around 1-2 percents. You will agree that it is one big plus. We should also mention process of making, which is being reduced to 80nm. Apart from cheaper manufacturing it should enable less heating. We had two models in our test, and interestingly enough, they were both factory overclocked.
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Graphics cards 
