Moving onto the card, the first thing you notice is the rather beefy aftermarket cooler.
We have the normal SLI connector which we see on all 8600 series cards, but the biggest surprise comes with the power connector for the card. For some reason MSI have opted to use a standard 4-pin molex connector instead of the typical 6-pin PCI-Express connector we find more often. While this is nice, to be completely honest even the cheapest power supplies offer a PCI-Express power connector these days, so the benefits of using the standard molex connector aren’t really as big as they once would’ve been..
I/O wise we have our DVI port which offers full support for up to 2560 x 1600 along with our TV-Out port. Also included is the all important HDMI port which makes this card the Diamond Plus. The only thing is that the front of the box says “Dual DVI”, when you read this you would tend to think we have two DVI ports, if it was in reference to the fact that the DVI port supported “Dual-Link”, then that should have been made a little clearer.
Getting a bit deeper into the card, we have with us a 675MHz core and a 2000MHz memory clock which is standard for the 8600GTS. The biggest feature of the card though is clearly the inclusion of the HDMI adapter.
