MSI NX8600GTS Diamond Plus

'Homely' is the best word we can think of to descibe this mid-range card.

With the 8800 series of GPUs from NVIDIA commanding the top-end with considerable coverage compared to the HD2900XT, it appears that AMD ATI has turned its attention to the more budget-orientated market.

In said market, one can find this little gem, the MSI NX8600GTS Diamond Plus. True treasure or cubic zirconia? We had to know.

After running 3DMark06, it’s evident that the mid-to-low range 8-series is not heavily gaming-orientated, unlike its more expensive but market-leading 8800 brethren. Scoring a result of 5726 3DMarks, it’s a good thing that this graphics card has other more homely features to help sell it.

By homely, we’re referring to the features ideal for a home theatre PC, or as it’s most commonly referred to these days, a HTPC. The most ideal of these features being HDMI, which this card conveniently includes. Unfortunately, we did find some problems with implementing the card in this environment.

The first of these flaws is the inability to stream audio over the HDMI output, unlike the ATI competition that can. While the card may have a native HDMI port, the ATI alternative is better for those wanting full-spec HDMI output.

An additional oversight is the cooling hardware utilised by MSI on the card. One would generally be fairly safe to assume that it would be a quiet bit of kit. What we actually have isn’t quite akin to a monkey vocally expressing its annoyance at being restrained from its banana, but the card is louder than the reference heatsink found on the AMD ATI HD2600XT. Add to this the fact that it is a dual-slot card and it is another strike against it in the HTPC sector, where space is generally at a minimum.

A valiant effort by MSI and NVIDIA, and a step in the right direction, but at this stage, we see the HD2600XT-based cards being the better alternatives for the HTPC builder.