XFX GeForce 8600 GT XXX

Well, in an odd decision, I've decided to review the latest piece of hardware to come into my possession, that being XFX's GeForce 8600 GT: XXX Edition. To my surprise, it's a fair jump from my eVGA GeForce 7600 GT. Aside from it's DirectX 10 capabilities, it also has much-higher-then-stock clock and memory speeds, is a DDR3 model and sports dual DVI ports. It's biggest problems lie in its 128-bit bandwidth, which slows the rate at which the higher-speed clocks can pump polys, and only 256 MBs of onboard memory, which makes it harder to handle really high resolution textures, such as Doom 3's Ultimate settings (which suggest a minimum of 512 MBs). It does have the 8 Series' Unified Shader feature, which doesn't limit shaders to either vertex or pixel shading, instead allowing them to freelance, which eliminates idle shaders and speeds up shader-heavy games. As for performance, I've noticed a large image quality jump from my 7600 GT, with less texture bouncing. Tiger Woods 07 has allowed me to enable cloud shadows for the first time, and the deep rough, which before dropped my framerate by as much as 20 FPS, now has no effect at all. Oblivion runs fairly well on High, with high-res textures and most sliders at the mid point. Unreal Tournament 2004 has shown the oddest results, exhibiting odd hitching that was not as evident before, however it's primarily a CPU-bound game, so I'm skeptical as to the card's effect on this. On a slightly irrelevant note, I've been doing low-res tests in 3DMark 05 since I had my old Athlon XP and a Radeon X1600 Pro, and have re-tested with each change I've made. Unfortunately, to keep the tests relevant to one another, I have to follow the settings of the first test, which were 800x600 with 2x AA and AF.  On the plus side, this does show how each hardware change has improved on the other, so I'll share those numbers here.

• Athlon XP 1900+, Radeon X1600 Pro: 3505 3DMarks
• Athlon 64 3200+, GeForce 7300 GT: 2966 3D Marks
• Athlon 64 3200+, GeForce 7600 GT: 5384 3D Marks
• Athlon 64 3200+, XFX GeForce 8600 GT XXX: 8661 3D Marks

A jump of almost 1300 3D Marks with just a video card change; that's significant, no matter the settings. So, I wholeheartedly reccomend this card to gamers on a budget. It likely won't be up to the task for DX10 games, but for the games out now, it's a great mid-range card. Enjoy! Alphasim out.

Powered by Bravenet.com