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The power conscious chip, G84. |
Under the hood we find G84, no surprises there. It's much, much smaller than G80 thanks to its 284m transistors and 80nm process, die size is only 169mm². Compare that to G80, which has 681m transistors and a die size of 481mm².
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The NVIDIA reference card
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MSI's card, though based on the reference design does have some noticeable differences. The most glaringly obvious is that it sports a red PCB instead of green, which is a typical look for the entire MSI range. They've also replaced the reference heatsink with their own all copper model. At just 178mm the 8600 GT is a little shorter than the 8600 GTS (187mm). NVIDIA claim a 43W power draw at full load on the 8600 GT, 23W less than a GTS, and as a direct result of this low power draw you won't find a PCI-E connector, it doesn't need one.
The "OC Edition" naming scheme isn't a reference to the popular US teen drama, The O. C. You won't find an emblem of the gang on the heatsink... Breathe a sigh of relief, as the name instead suggest this is a factory overclocked card. The reference 8600 GT is clocked at 540 / 1400, MSI raise the game to 580 / 1600, a pretty respectable leap.
MSI 8600 GT OC Edition |
| Core Clock : |
580 MHz |
| Shader Clock: |
1.25 GHz |
| Memory Clock: |
1600 MHz |
| Memory Bandwidth: |
25.6 GB/s |
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For those of you with sensitive ears, MSI have another 8600 GT available that sticks with reference clocks but uses a passive heatsink with heatpipes, the NX8600GT-T2D256EZ. With the 8600 GT able to fully offload HD decoding from the CPU it could make for a excellent HTPC card.
The 8600 GT comes two dual link DVI-I outputs for connection to analog and digital monitors and HDTV's, and an S-Video port that supports composite and component outputs.
In the box you'll find:
- A paper manual.
- A driver CD.
- 2x DVI to Analog VGA adaptors
- An S-Video + componant dongle with HDTV support
- S-Video extension lead.
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Samsung BC14 1.4ns memory chips |
The memory chips found on the MSI 8600 GT OC Edition are Samsung's 1.4ns with a theoretical top end of 700 MHz, so they've already been overclocked well beyond spec. As a result, overclocking headroom will probably be conservative at best.
MSI's RRP on this card at the moment is just a few notes short of £100, you can currently find it at dabs direct.
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EVGA e-GeForce 8800 Ultra Superclocked
Best Price:)
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