A Closer Look

When we open the box, we can find a user manual, a molex to 6-pin power connector, a s-video cable, a s-video to audio converter, a cd with all necessary drivers and of course the card itself.



Let’s take a close look to the card.



The card has a nice design Coolermaster cooler to keep the card from overheating.



Galaxy still offers users to directly attach a D-Sub VGA screen, where many other manufacturers feature two DVI connectors. Of course, there’s a tv out.



Between the cooler and the core, we find a silver cooling paste nicely covering the entire core. The heatsink of the cooler is copper.



The Galaxy 8600GE features an extra 6-pin power connector, the engineers try to maximize the 8600GE’s capabilities when it comes to overclocking. The extra power connector is not standard on 8600GT cards, but is on the 8600GTS card.



This is where the fun kicks in, look at those memory chips. 1ns is good enough for a 1GHz (!) memory clock, which has never been seen on a stock 8600GT.



Looking at the specs tells us that the maximum allowed frequency was obtained by Galaxy. The chips are working at full speed.



Although the standard voltage of the Samsung memory chips is rated at 1.9 or 2.0 volt, Galaxy chooses to give the memory extra juice, 2.05V. Maybe interesting for our volt-modders and extreme benchmarkers: the maximum rated voltage is 2.5v, more than enough to break the standard limits.



We notice two jumpers on the upper left corner of the card. The red one is for enabling/disabling a buzzer which goes off in case of overheating. The blue one is for a project which is still under NDA, but we can tell you it’s a feature which will be loved by overclockers.

Last but not least, the back of the card.



Time to put this card to the test ->