Verdict: £100 is way too much to spend on this underpowered GPU.

The 8600 GTS was Nvidia's first attempt at producing a cut-price DirectX 10 GPU. As with the high-end 8800 GTX on which it was based, it featured a cluster of stream processors that ran far faster than the rest of the GPU, but was otherwise stripped down to the basics.

For example, while the magisterial 8800 GTX has 128 stream processors, the 8600 GTS has just 32. In addition, the number of texture processors was dropped from 32 to 16, and the number of ROPs from 16 to eight.

However, this still leaves the 8600 GTS in a stronger position than the similarly priced HD 2600 XT, which ATI crippled by giving it just four ROPs. The GPU in the 8600 GTS is clocked at 675MHz, but its stream processors run much faster at 1.45GHz. Most 8600 GTS cards are fitted with 256MB of GDDR3, which is clocked at 1GHz (2GHz effective) as standard.

As one of the first unified shader GPUs, the 8600 GTS is a basic PCI-E 1.1 card and doesn't support Shader Model 4.1 or DirectX 10.1. However, considering that it struggles to deliver a smooth frame rate in current games, it almost certainly won't be able to cope with Shader Model 4.1 or DirectX 10.1 when they appear. That said, the 8600 GTS was able to play Call of Duty 4 and Need for Speed: Pro Street smoothly at 1,024 x 768.

However, you can forget about playing Crysis on an 8600 GTS, as the minimum frame rate of 11fps at 1,024 x 768 makes aiming practically impossible.

Although the 8600 GTS is based on the same superior architecture as other GeForce 8-series GPUs, its tiny bank of stream processors limits its performance when playing games at low resolutions. Games such as Crysis are simply far too demanding for the 8600 GTS. As such, it would be a criminal waste to spend £100 on an 8600 GTS.

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