jmke

nVIDIA's GeForce 8600 family offers a heck of a value if you're on a tight budget and want to play DirectX10 videogames.... Albeit at a lower resolution. Most entry level videocards claim 3D capability but often deliver sticky slow framerates. What fun is that? This card isn't going make 100FPS in every game a reality, but it will at least get you into most games with +60FPS levels. At lower resolutions both Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and FEAR both show similar results which are pretty good considering those two games are quite hard on videocards. For less demanding games like Quake 4, framerates are good even with max details turned on at 1600x1200.<br><br>

More importantly the MSI NX8600GT-T2D256E-OC is able to handle the DirectX 10 games we tested with at low details and a resolution of 1024x768. It gives you an idea of what to expect from all the DirectX 10 fuss. The MSI NX8600GT-T2D256E-OC retails for about $144 CDN ($135 USD, £67 GBP), making it one nice videocard when you consider its cost. The videocard natively supports dual DVI outputs, TV and component output, and even HDCP. As you witnessed in the benchmarks the 3D performance of the MSI NX8600GT-T2D256E-OC videocard was pretty good all around. It ran most games adequately at 1024x768. Higher 1600x1200 resolutions may be too much for it however, particularly if the game is rather new, so bear that in mind. On the overclocking front the pre-overclocked NX8600GT-T2D256E-OC was easily boosted to 708 MHz core and 1730 MHz memory in our tests with it.<br><br>

All things considered, the MSI NX8600GT-T2D256E-OC is not the least expensive GeForce 8600GT out there, but it's certainly one of the better ones. It supports nice things like dual DVI outputs and comes pre overclocked from the factory. If you're on a tight budget this is a videocard you'll want to look into.

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=2146

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