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Summary

The following is a summary of the more detailed analysis of the EVGA 8600 GT Superclocked graphics card. For all the in-depth analysis and testing you'd expect from us, be sure to click this link to get all the details!

Click this link to get the full article

Last week NVIDIA unveiled their new mainstream GPU offerings in the form of the 8600 GTS, 8600 GT and 8500 GT graphics cards.  Our first article covered only the new BFG Tech 8600 GTS OC card and compared it to the similarly-priced card from AMD's ATI Radeon line.  This time we are testing the EVGA e-GeForce 8600 GT Superclocked video card that aims to be even more impressive (compared to the competition) than its older brother and sell for $50 less! 

The cooler on the GPU of the EVGA 8600 GT is actually a bit bigger than the one on the XFX 8600 GT (review coming later this week) I have also been testing. The fan is a bit larger as well and general made slightly less noise than the XFX model, but no dramatically so.  You can also still see the single SLI connector for pairing up your 8600 GT with another for improved gaming performance.

As we mentioned before, this is the "Superclocked" version of the 8600 GT from EVGA so you can expect there to be some overclocking involved straight out of the box.  Here are the specs:

• 576 MHz core clock versus 540 MHz stock
• 1.50 GHz memory clock versus 1.18 GHz stock

Some quick benchmarks:

Whereas with the 8600 GTS card I was mostly let down by the overall DX9 gaming performance compared to ATI's X1950 Pro (the competing product price-wise), the 8600 GT card from EVGA was able to outperform the X1650 XT card from ATI at nearly all the tests. 

There are a couple of notable exceptions, including both FEAR and HL2: Episode 1 where a very dramatic driver issue made the games basically unplayable.  I have confirmation from NVIDIA that they have reproduced the bug and are already actively working on the solution and will get a sample driver for me very soon to test out.  Once that issue is ironed out though, I am fairly confident that NVIDIA will be at the same performance level, if not past, of the X1650 XT card. 

The next-generation titles that are extremely "leading edge" titles like Rainbow Six Vegas saw very substantial performance leads on the 8600 GT over the ATI X1650 XT; the average frame rate was 25% faster at 1280x960 on the NVIDIA card.  Battlefield 2142 did see up to 11% performance gains, 6-8% on Supreme Commander and 20% on Prey.

Pricing and Availability

According to NVIDIA, the GeForce 8600 GT cards should fall into the $149-159 price range, a good $50 lower (or more) than the 8600 GTS cards we saw last week.  A quick look at the pricing in our real-time pricing engine shows that we can't get an 8600 GT for anything lower than $154 plus shipping.  That's relatively close to the price range NVIDIA suggested to its partners, but this EVGA 8600 GT SuperClocked model we tested is priced only as low as $179.  Keeping in mind that EVGA is offering a highly overclocked card as well as a full lifetime warranty on the card, the price increase over MSRP is mostly justifiable. 

Final Thoughts

The EVGA GeForce 8600 GT is a great graphics card for the mainstream market and is able to outperform the competition from AMD's X1000 line of GPUs while offering more features and image quality enhancements too!  If you are looking for a ~$170 graphics card to play the latest games at decent resolutions and quality settings, I think you'll be very happy with the performance and support that EVGA's 8600 GT Superclocked card offers. 

The only caveat is the upcoming release of AMD's R600 series of GPUs; it's no secret that this is coming in a month or so but what they are going to cover is still a mystery.  This summer is going to very busy at PC Perspective!

If you have any questions or comments about this review, please jump over to this thread in our forums to let us know, or just to see what others are saying!

Be sure to use our price checking engine to find the best prices on the EVGA 8600 GT 256MB Superclocked, and anything else you may want to buy!

Click here for the Detailed Review