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

With ATi continuing to hold back their forthcoming R600 GPU from general release, Nvidia's 8-series cards have been allowed to become, much to the chagrin of Radeon fanboys, synonymous with both DirectX 10 and cutting-edge performance. There's no denying that slotting an expensive 8800 GTS or GTX into your machine, with their heavy, quiet dual-slot coolers and large, black PCBs, gives you that warm fuzzy feeling that only a quality, premium graphics card can bring.

For most though, it's the cards that fall into the more budget-friendly 'mid-range' category that are the realistic options. Thankfully, for those who don't want, or can't afford to spend £180+ on a 320MB 8800 GTS, Nvidia has bolstered the 8-series with two cheaper mid-range cards, namely the 8600 GT and the faster, more expensive 8600 GTS, both of which support DirectX 10.

The BFG 8600 GTS certainly looks very different from what we're used to with the 8-series. The small, thin heatsink and fan doesn't breed confidence in terms of overclocking potential, or noise levels, but at least the card's compact low profile means you now have a much better chance of fitting a Direct X 10 card inside a cramped media centre or small form factor PC case. Having said that, after installing the card, the cooler didn't turn out to be quite the wailing banshee that we thought it was going to be, though it still emits an audible high-pitched whoosh when under load.

The moody black PCB of the high-end cards has gone - the GTS's PCB is coloured in the traditional 'this is an Nvidia card' green. At 18.7cm long, the 8600 GTS has a slightly longer PCB than that of the 8600 GT, which comes in at 17.9cm, to allow for the fact that the GTS requires a PCI-E power plug from the PSU to provide it with extra juice, whereas the GT, being slightly less power-hungry, has no need for an additional power connector. The PCB also has the obligatory SLI connector to allow two cards to be run in parallel, although we weren't able to test this in time for this review.

As well as the BFG's looks, the card's spec list is also much less imposing than the high-end cards. The most significant cutback is that the 8600 GTS is equipped with only eight ROPs and 32 stream processors, compared with the 96 stream processors of the 8800 GTS, and 128 of the imperious 8800 GTX. The stream processors are the general-purpose workhorses of Nvidia's GPU architecture, tasked with crunching the complex vertex and pixel shader code crammed into the latest games, so obviously the more stream processors a GPU has, generally the more powerful it will be when it comes to playing games. For more detail on the stream processors, you might like to check out our review of the GeForce 8800, and our in-depth coverage of DirectX 10 technology.