FOR A WHILE NOW, WE'VE decried the lack of variety among high-end graphics cards. Most of these cards are actually built by manufacturers under contract with AMD or Nvidia, and they're shipped to add-in board partners who often do little more than change the sticker on the heatsink. That's left plenty of room to poke fun at the art direction behind various heatsink stickers, but it's also made high-end graphics card round-ups a bit of a bore.

Fortunately, there's a lot more variety in the world of mid-range graphics cards like the GeForce 8600 series. These affordable alternatives to flagship products are the kinds of cards most of us end up buying anyway, and manufacturers have a lot more freedom to build their own boards, concoct custom cooling solutions, and mess with core and memory clock speeds. Each add-in board partner brings a unique flavor to the table, and we've rounded up a handful of GeForce 8600 series cards from Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI to see how they compare. Read on to see which of these manufacturers puts the best spin on Nvidia's latest mid-range GPUs.