nVIDIA has further strengthened its lead over AMD with the release of the GeForce 8600GTS and it is the first DirectX 10 videocard aimed at the mainstream market. Those of you waiting for a truly Microsoft Windows Vista ready videocard now have something to get. Best of all the GeForce 8600GTS is more affordable than the previous GeForce 7600GT generation!

MSI has taken what nVIDIA has done with the GeForce 8600GTS and tweaked it so it's even better. The MSI NX8600GTS-T2D256E-OC comes factory overclocked and equipped with a swanky low noise heatsink. The MSI NX8600GTS-T2D256E-OC retails for an aggressive $224 CDN ($199 USD, £99 GBP)! Faster than the previous generation, quieter, and less expensive. Talk about the best of both worlds!

The MSI NX8600GTS-T2D256E-OC videocard is based on the reference design but sports the usual MSI red colour. The heatsink that MSI installs looks very much like a custom Arctic Cooling Silencer and allows the NX8600GTS-T2D256E-OC to operate at a high speed yet remain quiet. According to MSI its custom heatsink keeps the G84 core ~15 degrees Celsius cooler than the reference heatsink. Looking at the technology behind the GeForce 8600GTS, it is nice to see that the core automatically supports HDCP. If you're building a home theatre or entertainment PC, you do not have to worry about high definition movies running at a lower quality. The nVidia G84 core obviously has less horsepower under the hood with 32 stream processors (96 for GeForce 8800GTS and 128 for GeForce 8800GTX) but as the benchmarks indicated, that wasn't too huge a limiter. Memory bandwidth will be the thing that holds the GeForce 8600GTS back the most as the memory bus width is only 128 bits wide.

In the benchmarks the MSI NX8600GTS-T2D256E-OC performed well at lower resolutions (1024x768) with details at max. At higher resolutions the lack of bandwidth really held the NX8600GTS-T2D256E-OC back. Even though the MSI NX8600GTS-T2D256E-OC comes pre-overclocked from the factory, PCSTATS was able to overclock it to 774 MHz core and 2240 MHz memory! Overclocking helps when running at high resolutions and we saw some decent performance boosts from stock in the benchmarks.

nVIDIA is moving at a pace AMD simply can't keep up with. For well over a year now nVIDIA has owned the videocard market and with cards like the MSI NX8600GTS-T2D256E-OC, consumers have hardly noticed the absence of the "other major videocard player". The MSI NX8600GTS-T2D256E-OC is a great videocard and if you've been itching to upgrade to a DirectX10 unit, but don't want to spend a lot of money, this card is for you!

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