Graphics performance

Performance is predictable at stock speeds. The MSI NX8600GTS's revved-up clock speeds give it a bit of an edge over the stock-clocked GTS cards from Asus and Gigabyte, and the MSI NX8600GT's faster-than-stock speeds allow it to keep up surprisingly well with the GTS field.

Unfortunately, even an overclocked core can't help the NX8500GT overcome its fewer stream processors and pokey memory clock. The card may sell for half the price of an 8600 GTS, but it offers less than half the performance.

Overclocking
The handy automatic overclocking utility built into Nvidia's graphics drivers and then relocated to its nTune system utility doesn't seem to be working properly with the GeForce 8600 or 8500 series, so we had to kick it old-school with manual slider manipulation and loads of trial-and-error testing. In order to qualify as stable, each of our overclocked configurations had to loop successfully through three iterations of 3DMark's Shader Model 3.0 tests at 1280x1024 with 4X antialiasing and 16X aniso, and then endure ten minutes of Oblivion at maximum detail levels.

We were able to hit the following core and memory clock speeds with each card (doubling the memory clock speed gives you the effective memory clock):

  • Asus EN8600GTS — 763MHz core, 1151MHz memory
  • MSI NX8600GTS — 765MHz core, 1169MHz memory
  • MSI NX8600GT — 686MHz core, 866MHz memory
  • MSI NX8500GT — 785MHz core, 505MHz memory
  • Gigabyte GV-NX86S256H — 763MHz core, 1048MHz memory
The real winner here is the MSI NX8500GT, whose 460MHz core ramped nearly 70% to hit 785MHz. It's also interesting to note that all three 8600 GTS cards, including the passively cooled Gigabyte, hit around 760MHz for the GPU core. Overclocking success can vary from card to card, but the fact that all three eclipsed 760MHz suggests the 8600 GTS has plenty of headroom.

Beyond that, you can see the numbers, but remember: it's hard to draw definitive conclusions based on the overclocking performance of a single example of each product.

Overclocking doesn't change the performance picture dramatically, but the NX8500GT gets a huge boost from its wildly overclocked core. Notice how the Asus and MSI cards offer nearly identical performance when they're running at essentially the same speed.