Foxconn 8600 GTS Graphic Card Review
Are you seeking to read a detailed review of the Foxconn 8600 GTS? If yes, continue reading this article.
So far, the GeForce 8 series has been met with great affection, and as expected, NVIDIA has today (well, yesterday) announced the missing pieces of the jigsaw. For all intents and purposes, the Geforce 8 series lineup is now complete from top to bottom, and DX10 galore is now at the feet of the masses.
Foxconn 8600 GTS: Features
NVIDIA has announced five new mainstream DX10 cards, which bring the feature set and architectural design of the more expensive 8800 cards to much lower price points, and thus into many more people’s budgets.
While the 8500 GT will offer decent performance for its price tag, the real interest for us (and probably you) lies squarely with the 8600 GT and GTS. The only difference between these two are clock speeds, so both have 8 rops, 128 bit memory interface, 32 stream processors, and so on.
You may feel 32 is a little on the low side, but there are a few differences between G80 and G84’s shader blocks, the latter having the upper hand. For example, in an 8800 GTX, you find 8 shaders “blocks” and each contains 16 SPs, 8 texture filter, and 4 texture address units. With G84 each block contains 16 SPs, 8 texture filters, and 8 texture address units.
Because there are far fewer SP’s and whatnot in G84, the transistor count is drastically reduced over G80, it’s much more in line with G71 in fact at 281m, and let’s not forget the move to 80nm. All of these cuts have advantages: the GTS’s maximum power consumption is only 71W, while the GT’s is 43W. Also noteworthy is that the GT doesn’t require a PCI-E power plug.
Foxconn 8600 GTS
Taking off the moderately sized heatsink sits G84. 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.
Foxconn’s card sticks to the reference design here, which is not all that surprising at this stage, the only difference here is the Foxconn branding on the top of the heatsink. The 8600 GTS is a little shorter than a 7900 GT at just 187mm.
As already mentioned, NVIDIA state a 71W power draw at full load, and you’ll find a 6-pin PCI-E connector on all GTS boards. The cooler for the 8600 GTS is decent enough and runs nice and quiet. Obviously the board supports SLI, and hopefully we’ll be able to look at this some time in the future.
The memory chips found on the Foxconn are Samsung’s 1.0ns flavour with a theoretical top end of 1000 MHz, so perhaps not much overclocking headroom here, we’ll find out later.
And finally, you get a 2-year warranty just incase you encounter any hiccups down the road. Foxconn are expecting this card to hit all the main retailers early next week with a RRP of £130.
Test Setup & Benchmarking Explained
To evaluate the 8600 GTS, we tested it on a Core2 Extreme X6800 with an Asus P5W-DH and 2GB memory at 800 MHz with 4-4-4-12 timings. We’ve compared the card against the reference 8800 GTS 320MB, and the 7900 GT 256MB.
We now have replacement board thanks to MSI, but were not able to test it in time for this article. Still, the main competition at this price level would have been the 7900 GS and X1950 Pro, so the 7900 GT we’re using is actually faster then these two, keep that in mind.
We don’t test video cards using typical benchmarking methods, read on.
Best Playable Settings Explained
It’s all good and well knowing that card A is faster then card B at 2048×1536, but what good is this knowledge if both cards are still averaging under 10 fps? You wouldn’t sit down and try to play the game like this, so its quite irrelevant.
The best playable settings aim is to find the limits of each cards performance and outlay what you can realistically expect to achieve in terms of image quality and screen resolutions. We actually bench at multiple resolutions, and the first graph named “Best Playable Settings” is what we think are the most playable settings for the card.
Then follow this up with various other resolutions and show what performance you can expect, NOT by leaving all settings at max and reporting 4fps, but by doing exactly what you would do at home — lower the image quality settings in an attempt to get a playable frame rate.
We believe this is the best method of testing, we hope you agree.
Some games are nowhere near enjoyable at 30 fps while others are perfectly acceptable. This is a fact and is determined by the game engine and style of gameplay. The current games we use to test with have been played to death, and we believe that to enjoy these games you need to aim for:
Rainbow Six: Vegas 40 fps +
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion 40 fps +
Battlefield 2142 50 fps +
FEAR 50 fps +
We test all cards firmly concentrating on the frame rate levels shown above in order to keep the game enjoyable. For example, Fear has a highly inconsistent frame rate. You simply cannot play this game with an average of 40fps. This is because the minimum frame rate will consistently consume your enjoyment.
Image quality – ATI vs NVIDIA: Anti-Aliasing
Anti-aliasing (AA) is a feature available on all modern video cards. AA aims to smooth out the edges of objects from within the game world. AA is notoriously bandwidth intensive and the higher the level, the more bandwidth it uses. For example, 2x MSAA is half as memory intensive as 4xMSAA, and so on. There are many different types of AA in current video cards, these are:
- MSAA – found on both AMD and NVIDIA hardware
- Transparent AA – An NVIDIA only mode
- Adaptive AA – An AMD only mode
- CSAA – New mode found only on the Geforce 8 series.
They works by scaling up (twice in X and twice in Y) the image from it’s intended resolution. Then the image is rendered, and then scaled back down. It should be obvious that the increase in rendered pixels is costly to performance.
Conclusion
The Foxconn 8600 GTS is a solid graphics card that offers a good balance of performance and value. I recommend this card to those looking for a budget-friendly solution for playing games in moderate to high settings. The card also features a compact design, making it a good option for users building small form factor PCs.
The Foxconn 8600 GTS is also a good for a reliable and stable graphics card for everyday use. It is a great choice for users looking for a budget-friendly graphics card that offers good performance and value.
