MSI 8500GT, 8600GT OC, 8600GTS OC

Nvidia's first mid-range 8-series cards leave us unaroused.

Not content with letting Intel have all the fun putting the squeeze on AMD, NVIDIA has rolled out its mainstream DirectX 10 cards to flesh out the GeForce 8 family.

No doubt NVIDIA will eventually see the opportunity to fill in even more SKUs, with the extra GS, GX2, GP, GST, Gumby and Gorbachev editions that tend to come along. Logically the market doesn’t really need this many SKUs – it obviously works financially though, or NVIDIA and AMD wouldn’t be doing it.

The parts in question are the 8600 GTS, 8600 GT and 8500 GT, all hobbled with a 128-bit memory bus. This indicates that they’re positioned to pick up where the 7600 GT left off, but as you’ll see from the subsequent benchmarks, things get interestings indeed, especially as far as the 7900GT is concerned.

These new GPUs use NVIDIA’s 80nm process, bringing it up to speed with AMD’s best. Check out the stats table – the 8600 GTS is even clocked higher than the 8800 GTX in terms of core, although the number of cut stream processors is significant between the models and will limit the effectiveness of this.

Also different is NVIDIA’s VP2 chip – the 8800 GTX and GTS only feature VP1. It’s there to help accelerate H.264 content a little better through the GPU – apparently being capable of offloading the entire decoding process, leaving the CPU to manage other areas of the process. This should be a boon to those with low-specced media centre systems.

The NVIO chip is gone as well, the cards being perfectly able to handle 2560 x 1600 output all by themselves.

Apart from these changes it really is business as usual – two dual link DVI ports and SLI are available on everything except the 8500; power is only required on the 8600 GTS; and DirectX 10 is there for the taking at a more affordable cost than in the past.

Unlike the early generation of the GeForce 8 series, the mainstream cards are available at launch as overclocked versions – in fact we haven’t had a single vanilla 8600 cross our desks yet. In this case MSI’s 8600GT has come in at 580MHz core and 800MHz mem, the GTS at 690MHz core and 1050MHz mem.

You’ll also notice the street prices here are higher than the retail prices – this always tends to happen at a GPU launch, as demand outstrips supply. No doubt by the time you read this, prices will have normalised.



The 128-bit memory bus featured on all the cards was an unexpected cut, meaning that these new cards are really only competitive with the 7600 series, at least with AA turned on. Check out what happened with 3DMark06 when we switched it off to enable comparison with the old generation cards on the SM3.0/HDR tests – both 8600s clear the venerable 7900 GT with ease. The poor AA performance on behalf of the 8 series cards compared to the 7900GT may have something to do with this restricted memory bus.