Date:
Thursday , June 21, 2007
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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MSI NX8600 GT OC Edition

MSI's value priced and factory overclocked GeForce 8600 GT has been released, and it may be an affordable option compared to the higher priced GeForce 8600 GTS. Does the MSI NX8600 GT OC Edition have what it takes to deliver the goods compared to its bigger brother; can overclocking match 8600 GTS performance?

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Test Setup

For our system platform setup we are using the Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 processor at 2.4 GHz and 2 GB of OCZ DDR2-800 RAM. We are evaluating the MSI NX8600 GT OC Edition 256 MB PCI-Express video card against the NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS 256 MB PCI-Express video card.

Article Image

Both video cards were tested at their default frequencies, as you can see above. We also used the latest drivers officially available at the time of evaluation.

Game and Video Card Evaluation Setup

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. We use a high performance system, with a very fast CPU in order to remove CPU bottlenecking.

Wherever possible, we try to force anti-aliasing (AA) and anisotropic texture filtering (AF) from the video cards' respective control panels. Our experience has shown that using control panel options, as opposed to in-game options, usually results in better image quality and less "texture crawling". Therefore, in this article, wherever you see us use AF or AA in the table, and the in-game configuration screenshot does not reflect those AA or AF settings, we are forcing that feature from the control panel.

In our graphs, we use some abbreviations to indicate the method of AA or AF being used.

TR MSAA = Transparency Multisampling Antialiasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Multisampling quality setting on GeForce 7 and 8 series video cards.

TR SSAA = Transparency Supersampling Antialiasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Supersampling quality setting on GeForce 7 and 8series video cards.