The 8600GTS card from Chaintech is factory clocked at 743/1100 which is considered one of the highest among the cards we reviewed. As it is already overclocked near to the max of 750, we didn't overclock it further. In fact, the performance at this clock is amazingly fast.  I am not sure if Chaintech has done something to its firmware, this card runs faster than the reference card even if I set it to 675/1000.

Similar to the other 8600GTS cards, the performance comes close to the high end DX9 cards. In some games, it even overtook the X1950Pro graphics card. Although the performance is good at default, setting it to run AA/AF at high resolution 1600x1200 cripples the performance of the card. This is largely due to the 128 bits memory width the card employs.

In conclusion, this card is worth your penny if you intend to play some DX10 games. If you intend to play it at high resolution, i would suggest you switch off the AA/AF combinations.

Price ~ from 199

Pros

• Purevideo HD
• DX10 support
• SM4.0

Cons

• Fan is abit noisy
• 128bit memory width
• Package should include games

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.

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