Overclocking

We consciously did not include overclocking results in this review as the sample variance and cooling used to obtain results differs a lot. Since the Club 3D 8600 GT features passive cooling when you want to overclock it’s advised to add a fan to the heatsink, which will have a very positive effect on the temperature (looking at the large surface area of the aluminum fins). While the 8600 GT GPU has proven itself nicely in the past, scaling 10-20% without added voltage, the bottleneck on the Club 3D is actually the memory, the DDR2 chips at 500Mhz won’t go much higher, and the reduced memory bandwidth (compared to DDR3) is limiting the card’s performance. Overclocking the GPU will have less impact than hoped, compared to a DDR3 powered card.

Conclusive Thoughts

The Club 3D’s 8600 GT proved itself as a capable mid-range gaming card in our game benchmarks, although we question their choice for putting 512Mb DDR2 on there instead of 256Mb DDR3, while the performance difference between them is minimal, it’s there. The 512Mb on the card only showed its usefulness in one or two occasions.

The real selling point of the Club 3D 8600 GT however is not the amount of memory or the custom design PCB, but their choice of heatsink, the unit is completely passively cooled and this scores very high in our book as most reference cards come with noisy cooling solutions. While there are after marker products which let you obtain the same end result, Club 3D’s card comes preinstalled with one, at reduced cost with no risk of losing your warranty.

Price wise the Club 3D card scores well, available for ~€110 in online stores it’s cheaper than buying a reference Geforce 8600 GT card and installing a passive cooling yourself.

With its HDTV out capabilities and no-noise cooling this 8600 GT from Club 3D will certainly make the short-list if you’re in the market for a HTPC friendly product which doesn’t cost too much and still allows you to run the occasional game, be it a new one released this year or last year.

We thank Chistian from Club 3D for allowing to test their latest product, until next time!