Test System Setup

Processor(s): Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 3GHz (333MHz x 9)

Cooling: Corsair Nautilus500 (Supplied by Corsair) with Arctic Cooling MX-2 Thermal Compound (Supplied by Arctic Cooling)

Motherboard(s): ASUS Blitz Extreme (Supplied by ASUS)

Memory: 2 X 1GB Corsair XMS3 DDR-3 1066MHz 7-7-7-21 (Supplied by Corsair)

Hard Disk(s): Hitachi 80GB 7200RPM SATA-2

Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP2, Windows Vista

Drivers: Catalyst 7.9 and Forceware 162.18

Clearly we had to have a look at how the BFG Tech 8600GTS compares against a normal run of the mill model that carries with it default clocks, but at the same time we thought that we should go on an overclocking crusade to see just how the new ThermoIntelligence cooler holds up and what kind of gains we can expect. We managed to push even higher than the stock 710MHz/2000MHz to 734MHz/2296MHz, this even passing the clocks of the OC2 model which we mentioned earlier.

We have thrown in a HD 2600 XT which is the top mid-range card from AMD at the moment, this purely for comparisons sake. However, the biggest addition is the inclusion of Vista benchmarking which we just added to our Catalyst round up for the first time earlier this week.

3DMark05

Version and / or Patch Used: Build 130

Developer Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com

Product Homepage: http://www.futuremark.com/products/3dmark05/

Buy It Here

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.

Straight away we can see that the overclock gives us a nice bump in performance, that increase continues even further when we hit our max overclock.