BFG GeForce 8600 GTS OC Review

Posted at: 12:00am 17th April 2007 by Chris Lee

Price £152.73 Inc VAT
Supplier Overclockers
Manufacturer BFG

The 8600 GTS may have significantly fewer stream processors than an 8800 GTX, but, in an attempt to partially compensate for this, they are running at a higher clock speed than those of the high end cards. According to Nvidia, the stream processors of the 8600 GTS run at 1.45GHz, slightly faster than the 1.35GHz of the 8800 GTX, and much faster than the 1.2GHz of the 8800 GTS. Compared to the 8800-series, Nvidia has also doubled the number of texture address units that reside inside the texture processors of the 8600 GTS, which should allow it to perform anti-aliasing and texture filtering with relatively little performance hit.

Interestingly, the GPU clock speed of the mid-range 8600 GTS is faster than that of the high-end cards, with the Nvidia reference speed set at 675MHz. However, as you might expect from an enthusiast-focussed company, BFG has pre-overclocked the card's GPU, so it's now running at an impressive 710MHz. This is partnered with 256MB of GDDR3 memory running at a heady 1GHz (2GHz effective). This might sound impressive, but when you consider that the card only has a weedy 128-bit memory interface (the 8800 GTS has a 320-bit bus and the 8800 GTX a 384-bit bus) this translates into a fairly uninspiring 32GB/sec of memory bandwidth, which will hurt its performance at high resolutions.

With these high clock speeds in mind, we had high hopes for the performance of the GTS in our test games. Hitting the shelves bang on the £150 price point, the BFG 8600 GTS has 'mid-range' written all over it, and so the most important factor is whether the card performs well at 1,280 x 1,024, the native resolution of a similarly mid-range 17in and 19in TFT monitors. The BFG got off to a good start in F.E.A.R. This game may have been one of our benchmark tests for over a year now, but there's a very good reason for this, as it is still a beautiful game, and one which, with its flickering lights, twitching shadows and chaotic battle scenes, still has the potential to trip up an unsuspecting mid-range card. At 1,280 x 1,024 with 2 x AA and 2 x AF enabled, the BFG returned a pleasantly playable average frame rate of 59fps which never dropped below a fluid 32fps. This compares favourably with the lower performance of previous generation Nvidia mid-range cards such as the GeForce 7600 GT, although tellingly, the BFG 8600 GTS is out-performed in F.E.A.R. at these settings by a Radeon X1950 Pro.

Performance in both Prey and Need For Speed: Carbon was less assuring. Again, with the few remaining £150 X1950XTs being rather difficult to find at the moment, thanks to their recent drop in price and subsequent upsurge in popularity, the £110 Radeon X1950 Pro is the card to beat in this price range. In Prey at 1,280 x 1,024 the X1950 Pro manages to provide a playable minimum frame rate of 34fps. The BFG 8600 GTS however, a card which costs £40 more, only managed a disappointingly stuttery minimum frame rate of 23fps. In Carbon, the game was similarly jerky with the 8600 GT, with a low minimum of 23fps, while the Radeon managed a minimum of 28fps, comfortably on the right side of our 25fps 'playable' cut-off point.