Introduction

Today we continue our coverage of mid-range video card products with a test of the latest offering from Club 3D. A passively cooled 8600 GT with 512Mb DDR2 memory. In our previous test of the 8600 GT series we did here we found that the 8600 GT offers an excellent price/performance balance and is capable of handling the latest games at reduced resolution/detail without much issue.

The 8600 GT card can be had in all kind of flavors these days with manufacturers going the extra mile to make their offer stand apart; the Club 3D sample we received is fitted with a large heatsink and has no fan installed, its primary market is the HTPC user who wants to add more GPU power to his system, with DX10 compatibility, without adding noise.

Club 3D equipped their card with DDR2 chips for a total of 512Mb, while the GPU clock speeds and shader clock remain identical to the reference specifications. The average price for this passively cooled PCI Express video card is ~€110 in shops, which is only a fraction more as the reference card.

For our comparison today we included a XFX 7600 GT 256Mb GDDR3 video card and a Sparkle Geforce 8600 GT 256Mb GDDR3 available in stores for ~€99 which is based on the reference 8600 GT design.

From left to right: Sparkle 8600 GT , Club 3D 8600 GT, XFX 7600 GT



Let’s compare specifications:

	Sparkle 8600 GT	Club 3D 8600GT	XFX 7600GT	Original 7600GT
Productionprocess	80	80	80	90
Core clock	540 MHz	540 MHz	650 MHz	560 MHz
Shader clock	1180 MHz	1188 MHz	-	-
Memory clock	DDR3 1400 MHz	DDR2 1000 MHz	DDR3 1600 MHz	DDR3 1400 MHz
Amount of memory	256	512	256	256
Memory bus width	128	128	128	128

The “new” 7600 GT at 80nm enjoys a 16% boost in GPU clocks and 14% memory speed, the Club 3D runs at reference clock speeds but has 512Mb DDR2 memory.

Let’s take a closer look at the newcomer ->