X-bitlabs reviews MSI NX8600GTS-T2D256E-HD-OC video card
Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS didn't become an equal rival to ATI Radeon X1950 Pro, but we all knew that overclocked modifications of this graphics adapter are destined to come one day. Today we are going to introduce to you one of these cards and will find out how much faster it is than the original solution. We will also touch upon the overclocking potential of Nvidia G84 based graphics accelerators in general.
Thanks to its G80 graphics processor Nvidia was not only the leader in the sector of top-performance desktop graphics solutions but actually the single supplier of truly modern and fast graphics cards until the recent release of the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT. The G80-based GeForce 8800 series covered price ranges from $299-349 (GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB) to $599-$649 (GeForce 8800 GTX). The May 2 announcement of the GeForce 8800 Ultra extended this coverage further up to over $800.
Yes, the GeForce 8800 series brought the user extremely high performance as was confirmed by our tests but Nvidia didn't have anything to fight ATI's inexpensive solutions with in the lower market segments. Nvidia?s products on the previous-generation G71 processor had good performance but were inferior to AMD/ATI's solutions in capabilities and image quality. Particularly, the GeForce 7 series could not support FP HDR and full-screen antialiasing simultaneously and provided a much lower quality of anisotropic filtering in comparison with graphics cards from the Radeon X1950 and X1650 families...
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