Point Of View 8600GT, 8500GT - More tech
Author: Luka Rakamaric
Date: 26 Apr 2007

When we take a look at the card itself, we can see that the GPU is not producing a lot of heat. A pretty small cooler is all that is needed for the 80 nm GPU with 16 SPs, and it doesn?t get warm at all. The card has 256 MB of memory, which is perhaps too much for such a card, but there is also a model with 128 MB which should be a little cheaper, a welcome ?feature? in this segment. Having 256 MB of memory on this kind of GPU is really not something useful, except for marketing purposes. The bracket contains one DVI-I port supporting dual-link, so you can use resolutions that exceed 1200 pixels vertically. For your own sake, use such resolutions in 2D only. The other connector is a standard D-SUB, and there is also a standard 7 pin video out.

Point of View also sent us an 8600GT, which we have described in detail in our previous review, so we will just point out the basics. The 8600GT is based on a G84-305 A2 GPU (the GTS has a G84-400; later revisions have suffixes like 405). Its reference clock is 540 MHz, and the memory operates at 700 MHz. The memory is GDDR3, unlike the DDR2 on the 8500GT. The card is actually based on a well known 7600GT PCB, so companies will have no trouble using their own compatible PCBs to squeeze some extra performance. Since it uses a G84 clocked more than 130 MHz below the GTS, you can expect very many factory overclocked models to appear in the next few weeks, like it was the case with 7600GS that was fitted with GDDR3 memory and pushed almost as high as a GT.

We compared the two new cards with a 7600GT using our standard testbed:
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6700
- EVGA 680i SLI
- OCZ Platinum XTC PC2-8000, 2x1GB
- Western Digital RaptorX 150 GB
- OCZ GameXstream 850W

We benchmarked two resolutions and two modes, but with these cards we skipped the 1920x1200 4xAA 16xAF test run, because the 8500GT just isn?t capable of it. So all in all we did 3 test runs:

- 1280x1024 0xAA, 16xAF
- 1280x1024 4xAA, 16xAF
- 1920x1200 0xAA, 16xAF