Processor(s): Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 3.33GHz (366MHz x 9 and FSB 1:1) Motherboard(s): ABIT IN9 32X-MAX Wi-Fi (Supplied by Universal ABIT) Memory: 2 X 1GB Crucial PC8000 5-5-5-15 (Supplied by Crucial) Hard Disk(s): Hitachi 80GB 7200RPM SATA 2 Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2 Drivers: Catalyst 7.3 (X1950GT) / ForceWare 158.16 (8600GTS) / ForceWare 93.71 (7900GS and 7600GT SLI)
With a multitude of graphics cards in our labs, it was time to test the XFX GeForce 8600GTS XXX edition.
We have a stock clocked reference GeForce 8600GTS to see how the overclocked XFX edition compares to a stock card. We have a pair of XFX GeForce 7600GT Fatal1ty cards in SLI dual graphics mode, Inno3D and their iChill GeForce 7900GS and Sapphire’s Radeon X1950GT 256MB card. This pretty much covers the whole high-end mid-range market and what the GeForce 8600GTS should be competing against in terms of pricing.
As we currently still use the demo version of Company of Heroes and it’s in built performance test we have not included the SLI GeForce 7600GT results in this test due to the known issue that is found in SLI.
After our normal run of the mill tests we then proceed to stress the cards out as much as possible with high quality AA and AF testing. We had hoped to do some overclocking tests but it would seem that XFX have really taken the card to the max with their XXX edition. We tried overclocking another GeForce 8600GTS and it hit a very similar speed wall, which may very well be the limit of the chip and memory at this point in time with regular cooling.
For now though, let’s get these benchmarks underway and see how nVidia’s first DX10 mainstream graphics cards compares against the rest! XFX’s XXX edition is going to cost you around $240 USD (or roughly $300 AUD) in the United States (more expensive in Aus) and a regular non-factory overclocked version will cost you around $200 USD (or roughly $250 AUD).
Due to a lack of DX10 games and applications, we cannot provide any DX10 performance results but even if we could, we wouldn’t have anything to compare against anyway in the mainstream VGA segment.
3DMark05 is now the second latest version in the popular 3DMark “Gamers Benchmark” series. It includes a complete set of DX9 benchmarks which tests Shader Model 2.0 and above.
For more information on the 3DMark05 benchmark, we recommend you read our preview here.
Our first benchmark shows just how much an increase in clock speeds can help overall performance. The overclocked GeForce 8600GTS XXX from XFX brings our performance up to that of two GeForce 7600GT overclocked cards in SLI mode.
We will see if this continues to transform into real world tests in just a moment.
