| Article Index |
|---|
| Gainward GeForce 8600GTS 512MB VGA Card Review |
| Page 2 - Performance |
| Page 3 - 3DMark06 |
| Page 5 - Prey |
| Page 6 - Lost Planet (DirectX10) |
| Page 7 - Conclusion |
| All Pages |
With a massive boost of both memory and clock speed over the standard 8600GT, the
8600GTS should provide excellent performance for a minimal price, we put it to the test.
The GeForce 8600GTS from nVidia is their new video card entrant to tackle the mid range market, with prices starting at around AU$235 for a 256MB version, and around $285 for a 512MB version from some of the cheaper brands on the market. The Gainward card we have here today is a 512MB version and sells online for around AU$305, or to put it another way, about 50% more expensive than a 512MB version of a normal 8600GT which runs around AU$200.
The technology used in the 8600GT and GTS is essentially the same, except the 8600GTS runs at significantly higher clock speeds than the GT, with a core clock speed of 675Mhz as standard, making it the fastest core speed in the entire GeForce 8000 series, including the 8800Ultra. Don’t start thinking this means it’s the best performer in the group and you’ve found the world’s best bargain, because the 8600GTS is still choked by a 128-Bit memory interface and 32 stream processors which severely limit its throughput capacity, despite its high clock speed.
Below we have a table indicating the specs of the nVidia GeForce 8000 series.
| GeForce 8800 Ultra | GeForce 8800 GTX | GeForce 8800 GTS | GeForce 8600 GTS | GeForce 8600 GT | GeForce 8500 GT | GeForce 8400 GS | |
| Stream Processors | 128 | 128 | 96 | 32 | 32 | 16 | 16 |
| Core Clock (MHz) | 612 | 575 | 500 | 675 | 540 | 450 | 450 |
| Shader Clock (MHz) | 1500 | 1350 | 1200 | 1450 | 1190 | 900 | 900 |
| Memory Clock (MHz) | 1080 | 900 | 800 | 1000 | 700 | 400 | 400 |
| Memory Amount | 768MB | 768MB | 640MB or 320MB | 256MB or512MB | 256MB or 512MB | 256MB or 512MB | 256MB |
| Memory Interface | 384-bit | 384-bit | 320-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit | 128-bit | 64-bit |
| Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec) | 103.7 | 86.4 | 64 | 32 | 22.4 | 12.8 | 6.4 |
| Texture Fill Rate (billion/sec) | 39.2 | 36.8 | 24 | 10.8 | 8.64 | 3.6 | 3.6 |
As you can see from the table above, the memory clock speed has also been ramped right up, with a 1000MHz memory clock speed for the 8600GTS’s DDR3 memory. This speed increase gives the GTS a significant boost in memory bandwidth over the 8600GT, coming up to 32GB/s.
So everything is better and faster with the 8600GTS, but deep down it seems to be nothing more than an overclocked 8600GT, as there are no real improvements besides clocks speeds, no extra stream processors and no wider memory interface. Later in this review we’re going to see what type of performance increase you get for your money, but first we take a look at the card we’ll be using for those tests and the focus of this review; the Gainward Bliss 8600GTS.
At first glance the Gainward 8600GTS looks very impressive, with a dual-slot design and an apparently huge cooling system, however look closer and you see a very mediocre fan/heatsink system under some very large and largely useless metal mesh framework, and while the backing plate for the card has ventilation holes, there is nothing in the design of the cooling system to actually direct air through those holes and out of the computer case to help keep hot air out of your system. Instead, hot air is dispersed throughout your system, if they made the card this big surely they could have made the size serve some sort of practical purpose.
On the back of the card there are some very slim heat sinks installed on the memory chips, while the memory chips on the main side of the card have no heatsink at all, and rely solely on the airflow from the main GPU fan to keep them cool and stable, this is unlikely to stand up to much punishment in the way of overclocking.
Like other 8600 series video cards, the Gainward 8600GTS is SLI compatible, but unlike 8600GT series cards the GTS requires the PCI-Express 6-Pin power connector and a minimum 400W PSU, which thankfully shouldn’t be much of any issue with any reasonably current PC.
As far as connectors go, the Gainward Bliss GeForce 8600GTS comes with two Dual-Link DVI-I connectors which support HDCP and also comes with a DVI to VGA connector for each port. TV-Out is also included with support for S-Video, Composite and HDTV, all via a single breakout cable.
This card could have easily been made to fit into a single slot and save some room inside your case. However if you want your computer to look like you have 8800 series cards instead of 8600 series, than perhaps this is the one for you, but it’s only going to look that way at a quick glance due to the unnecessary large stature of the Gainward card. I’m much more a fan of function over form when it comes to hardware, make it faster/cheaper instead of looking funky, but maybe that’s just me.
Next we see how the Gainward 8600GTS performs...
For the performance tests, we will be doing our standard tests of 3DMark, Quake 4 and Prey under Windows XP, as well as a DirectX10 performance test using the ‘Lost Planet: Extreme Condition’ demo under Windows Vista.
The Gainward Bliss 8600GTS 512MB Video Card will be compared to a 8600GT and 8500GT, both of which have 256MB RAM.
The Test Setup:
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU
- ASUS P5N32-E SLI, nForce680i Motherboard
- Corsair TWIN2X 2GB PC2-8500 Memory Kit (2 x 1GB)
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB SATA-II Hard Drive
- Antec Basiq 500W ATX Power Supply
- Windows XP Pro SP2 for DirectX 9 Tests
- Windows Vista Premium for DirectX 10 Tests
We are still using Windows XP for the tests that are based on DirectX10, because even though they will work on Vista, XP gives a better result and as such they will be comparable to other similar tests we have done in the past. Only the DirectX10 test (Lost Planet) will be performed under Windows Vista.
The Results:
Firstly, we have 3DMark06:
As we can plainly see, there is a noticeable and significant speed increase for the 8600GTS over the 8600GT to the tune of around a 22% difference as would be expected given the difference in the specs between the two cards. While this is a good increase by anyone’s standards, whether it’s worth the price premium is another question.
{mospagebreak title=Page 4 - Quake 4}
Quake 4
The Quake 4 tests were run on a range of resolutions from 800x600 up to 1600x1200, on normal settings, 8x and 16x Anti-Aliasing. All tests were completed 3 times to ensure an accurate result (this took a LONG time on the 8500GT with 16xAA let me tell you).
The Quake 4 results show a similar story to 3DMark, however the difference is a bit easier to measure with these tests. The Gainward 8600GTS shows a performance increase of between 25-35%+ over the 8600GT depending on the resolution and Anti-Aliasing settings, which makes the 8600GTS seem like a more worthwhile upgrade considering its price difference. Deciding which of the cards give better ‘bang for buck’ is debatable, but we’re starting to see more of the picture now.
Prey:
Prey was run on the same resolutions as the Quake 4 tests, however only a max setting of 4x Anti-Aliasing was supported, and as such the tests were performed under standard settings and 4xAA only.
From the results we see around a 25% increase in performance for the 8600GTS over the 8600GT in the ‘Normal’ test, and around 30% in the 4xAA tests. As with the Quake 4 tests, both cards (GT and GTS) had a very similar drop in performance as the resolutions got higher, this is mostly because they’re almost the exact same cards only with the 8600GTS running at higher clock speeds, there’s no extra stream processors or GPU functions that would make any difference in any of the tests, unlike in other shootouts where we’ve compared ATI and nVidia cards where each had strengths and weaknesses, here both of them are on the same level.
So we’ve got fairly concrete evidence of the 8600GTS’s performance advantage under DirectX9 tests, next we’ll test out DirectX10 performance, and see if the 25% extra clock speed and 42% extra memory bandwidth provided to the 8600GTS can push it further in front.
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition is a game demo that uses DirectX10 under Windows Vista and has a built-in performance test for us to take advantage of. There are two tests, one called ‘Snow’ which is outdoors, long view distances, big open areas, explosions, big weather effects etc, and one called ‘Cave’ which is in an enclosed area with lots of moving 3D creatures. In keeping with previous tests we’ve done on this game, the test was run on resolutions of 640x480, 1280x720 and 1600x1200.
At low resolutions in the Snow test, both the 8600 cards performed very well, with around a 30% difference between the two, but when the resolutions rose, the performance dropped a surprising amount. I believe this is due to the restricting 128Bit memory pipeline of both of these cards really dragging down the performance when the demand for memory bandwidth grows. At 1600x1200 resolution the difference between the 8600GT and GTS is the biggest we’ve seen, at 35% for the cave test and a massive 69% for the snow test, which I thought was odd, but I left the test running for a few hours on each card, and the results are solid, the 8600GTS has much better performance at high resolutions under DirectX10.
Conclusion:
With 25% more clock speed, and 40% extra memory bandwidth for the 8600GTS over the 8600GT, the results we saw in the benchmarks pretty much fell right in the middle of these two numbers, giving a very predictable performance increase for the GTS over the GT. As for the 50% price premium you pay for a 8600GTS over a 8600GT, I’ll leave that up to you to decide if it’s good value or not, personally I don’t think it’s too bad.
That’s enough about the chipset, as for the Gainward Bliss 8600GTS 512MB version, it is a good quality card that stays near the lower end of the price spectrum, and even though I don’t particularly like or agree with some of its design elements, they wouldn’t stop me from owning or recommending one. The only real problem I see is that the cooling is only barely adequate and is far smaller than many other 8600GTS cards on the market, I say if they’re going to make a double slot card (many on the market have done single slot) then they should use that space better and include better cooling.
OzHardware Rating – 7.9/10
This product can be purchased online at www.techbuy.com.au (Direct Link)
