Galaxy 8600Ge Video Card Overclocking Review

Videocards/VGA Reviews by massman @ 2007-09-07

How can you differentiate yourself as video card manufacturer in a crowded market? Galaxy decided to add extra cooling and apply very high factory overclocked speeds to their 8600 GT based products which they call the 8600 GE. Coming close to speeds of the more expensive 8600 GTS we find out if this video card is worth your money if you are looking for a budget-minded VGA upgrade.

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Fear, Prey and Quake4

F.E.A.R.

F.E.A.R. is not a new title anymore as it was released in October 2005, however, this game still has splendid visuals, even today it you run it high detail it doesn’t look dated at all. You pay a price to get the visual splendor though; a high end card is required to run it fluently at high detail and increased resolution.

Madshrimps (c)


We ran the in-game benchmark at maximum details, FSAA 4x, AF 16x at a resolution of 1280x960.(19" widescreen rescaled this resolution dynamically). The more FPS, the better of course. These numbers are the average numbers, we never stumbled on a big frame drop with any of these cards.

Madshrimps (c)


As you can see, a default 8600GT has just enough power to render the game fluently. When overclocking the card, we notice how an extra 190Mhz on the memory does not really help, whereas 90Mhz extra core speed helps a lot.

Prey:

Prey uses the venerable game engine from ID software, Tech4 it’s called now, also used for Doom 3 and Quake 4. Prey started development back in 1995, and it took 11 years to see this project come to completion, but when it finally was launched, gamers were pleased with such beautiful graphics.

Madshrimps (c)


With the help of the HardwareOC Prey benchmark utility, we tested the card's performance. Once again, we chose to stress the video cards as high as possible, using the 1440x900 resolution, highest detail settings, AF 16x and FSAA 4x. For those who want to compare: we used the Guru3D demo.

Madshrimps (c)


For the first time, we see the 190Mhz boost paying of: almost 2fps average! An overclocked Galaxy 8600Ge manages to lift the fps up by 33%, impressive to say the least.

Quake 4

Quake 4 was released in 2006, based on the popular Doom 3 engine from ID Software. Even with the latest video cards, this game is a hard nut to crack if running in highest possible settings. Luckily, if you're able to play at the highest settings is so astonishing you never want to downgrade your card again.

Madshrimps (c)


We ran a custom-made time demo featuring the first level with one-to-one combat and outdoor scenes. The resolution we chose was again 1440*900, but this time we didn't use the maximum details (ultra settings), because these were designed for 512MB cards. Unfortunately, both the Galaxy and Sparkle video card were unable to render the game fluently enough to be 100% playable. So we set the details at high, AA 8x and FSAA 4x. SMP was enabled.

Madshrimps (c)


Once again, the extra memory clocks do the trick, giving that little bit of extra juice. Remarkable that the oc'd Galaxy card gives ~33% extra performance of the default 8600GT.
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Comment from Massman @ 2007/09/07
Extreme cooling hopefully in the near future
Comment from thorgal @ 2007/09/07
Nice 1 PJ. Looking forward to the OC fun
Comment from Sidney @ 2007/09/07
Not available in the U.S yet?
Why destroy a perfectly good running card; it would be like driving a new car at 50mph into a brick wall to see how much the bumper can withstand.
I guess the answer could be "because we can".
Comment from jmke @ 2007/09/07
I think Galaxy is mainly EU for now; if they can squeeze out maximum performance, and sell 8600 GTS performance card at 8600 GT price-tag, I don't see nothing wrong
Comment from MACMAC @ 2007/09/07
Is it possible that there is a typo in the Specifications chart?

The 8600GE and 8600GT are listed as having the same Memory Bandwidth and Texture Fill Rate, which logically can't be right.
Comment from jmke @ 2007/09/07
good catch, thank you for spotting the error, will have it fixed asap

 

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