The Results:

Firstly, we have 3DMark06:

We can see from these results we can see that compared to 7900GS, the 8600GT has only a slight performance advantage when running at standard speed, with the 8500GT having less than half the performance of its big brother. Both cards did fairly well when running 8x Anti-Aliasing, only dropping performance by around 40% which is good considering the amount of extra work the GPUs are undertaking.

Both showed a marked improvement when overclocked. The standard running speeds of the 8600 are 540Mhz Core speed, and 700Mhz Memory speed, upping these to 640/850Mhz respectively showed around a 16% improvement in the 3DMark score. The 8500GT (450/400Mhz normal, upped to 515/460Mhz) showed an improvement of around 12%. These overclocked speeds are not pushing the cards to their limit, but rather a modest increase that will still give 100% stability and can be done with standard cooling. With some serious tweaking and additional cooling capacity installed, there’s no doubt both these cards could be pushed quite a bit further.

Next we test out Quake 4.

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