nVidia GeForce 8600 GT / GTS test

New cards

nVidia will be introducing a total of five new cards, the GeForce 8600 GTS, GeForce 8600 GT, GeForce 8500 GT, GeForce 8400 GS and GeForce 8300 GS. Also they have announced a GeForce 8800 Ultra to be released soon, so they will have a comlete line up of DirectX 10 compatible cards ranging from prices of around £ 50 to £ 600. The Geforce 8300 GS and 8400 GS will solely be available to OEM manufacturers, so system builders like HP and Dell will get first picking of these. The 8600 and 8500 cards will be availble in shops and will be made by all the known nVidia partners.

The chip on the GeForce 8600 is codenamed G84 and has the same technology as its bigger brothers used in the 8800 cards. This means that the 8600 will be able to do everything that the 8800 can, but obviously not as fast. This is mainly caused by th efact that the G84 only sports 32 unified shaders, where the 8800 GTS has 96 and the GTX no less than 128. The budget cards will also operate on lower clock frequencies and have a smaller bus to the graphics memory. There are however two new features on the midrange cards that the high end cards do not have; firstly there is HDCP support on the dual-link DVI port in both the 8600 and 8500 cards allowing to watch Blu-Ray or HD-DVD movies without any problems on a 30 inch monitor. Secondly is the conpletely new video processor on the cards, which we will touch upon later.

The GeForce 8600 GTS and GT only differ in clock frequencies, the 8600 GTS operates at 675MHz core speed and 1000MHz memory. The GT is slightly slower operating at 540MHz GPU frequency and 700MHz for the memory. GTS cards will always be HDCP compatible, where the nVidia partners can choose if they will make a GT card HDCP compatible or not. The GTS cards would cost between £ 130 and £ 160, according to nVidia, and the GT models will change hands between £ 100 and £110.

The GeForce 8500 will make it possible to buy a DirectX 10 card for less than £ 60, but it will cost you a lot in terms of performance. The 8500 will only have 16 unified shaders and will be half as slow again as the GeForce 8600 GT. The 8500 GT cards will have a new videoprocessor that could make it the ideal card for media centre PC's, but more on that later.

On the 8400 and 8300 GS cards nVidia is very quiet, all we could find out were the clock frequencies and the fact that the cards will only sport a 64 bit memory controller. The GeForce 8800 Ultra has been annouced to counter the upcoming R600 cards by ATI, but the downside is that this card will put you back at least £ 600 and the definitive specifications have not been confirmed yet. Runors are that the G80 already has 160 unified shaders on the chip and that these will all be unlocked in the Ultra cards, but nVidia declined any comment on these claims.

Positioning

When the 8500 and 8600 cards arrive they will be replacing the Geforce 7 mid-range cards pretty quickly. The 8600 GTS will be replacing the 7950 GT, and the 8600 GS is replacing the GeForce 7900 GS. The other mid range or higher end GeForce 7 cards have already been declared as end-of-life.