80nm processor technology 8600GTS, 8600GT has 32 Stream processors and the 8500GT has 16 Stream processors. The 8600GTS draws a maximum power of 71W, 8600GT at 43W and 8500GT at 40W.

The number of transistors on 8600GTS and 8600GT is 289 million while the 8500GT has 210 million transistors.

Shader clk of the 8600GTS is 1450MHz, 8600GT is 1180MHz and 8500GT is 900MHz.

In the next few pages, we will be presenting the benchmarks of the Ref card of 8600GTS vs N8800GTS-320MX, GeForce 8800GTX and ATi X1950XTX card. Before we take a look at the scoreline, lets take a look at the test environment.

Graphics card tested

• NV 8600GTS with Forceware 101.02 (101.02 is modded from Guru3d)

• ASUS EN8800GTX AquaTank/HTDP/768M with Forceware 97.92

• ECS N8800GTS-320MX with Forceware 97.92

• Gigabyte GV-NX88X768-RH with Forceware 96.97

• NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTX with Forceware 96.94

• ATi X1950XTX with Catalyst 6.10

• ASUS EN7900GT with Forceware 91.31

• ASUS EAX1950Pro with Catalyst 6.10

Environment

• Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 / Intel INF 8.0.1.1002
• Intel X6800 Extreme Edition processor and QX6700
• 2 x 1024 MB Corsair CMX1024A-8500C5 (total 2GB)
• Hitachi 7K80 SATAII HDD
• Windows XP SP2