XFX 8600GT XXX Edition + EVGA 8600GT Superclocked SLI

Here's a great review on how two different 8600Gt cards can be setup in SLI mode..

The video card market is dominated by news of the high-end video cards that range in price of $400 USD and above. Those cards are the highest performing, most feature-rich cards in the industry, allowing the end-user to play games with high fidelity in graphics and with Anti-Aliasing enabled. The average end-user doesn’t have $300-600 to spend on a video card, and the video card companies (AMD and NVIDIA) sell many more $200 cards than they do $300+ cards.

NVIDIA launched their 8800GTX card in early November of 2006. This card was the first on the market to fully support DirectX 10 graphics features like Pixel Shader 4.0, Geometry Shaders and was a huge success for the company, selling over 400,000 in the first quarter of sales alone. The MSRP of that card ranged above $500 and it is still the most expensive, feature-rich highest performing card on the market. Today NVIDIA is bringing the features of the 8800 series to the mainstream with three new consumer cards, the 8600GTS for the $199-249 price range, the 8600GT for the $149 price range and the 8500GT for the $99 price range.

EVGA and XFX are two of NVIDIA’s biggest partners in terms of retail video card sales in the United States. They manufacture video cards based upon NVIDIA chips exclusively, meaning that they don’t have any ATI or Ageia-based video cards. We have good relations with both companies and today I’m going to review two 8600GT cards, one from XFX, and one from EVGA with some SLI testing thrown in for good measure.
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The benchmark you all been waiting for - MSI 8600GT in SLI mode!

Nvidia's latest G84 and G86 cards are doing the rounds on review sites at the moment, and because of this they are rather hard to come by. Fortunately, we have managed to get hold of a second 8600GT. Let's see what these bad boys can do in SLI.

Interestingly, the canted cooler proved problemamatic again when setting up SLI. We had the same memory clearance issues but the SLI bridge was also not quite able to fitted correctly due to one of the pins running through the fins sitting slightly too high on both cards. It all still worked correctly, but surprising that this was not noticed in testing.

Conclusion in short:
The performance gained from adding a second of these cards is clearly pretty impressive. These cards scale extremely well when moving to SLI from a single overclocked card. The 8800 series still retains the performance crown, but the 8600s together nip on the heels of the GTS 320s and completely dominate the x1950 series of cards from ATI/AMD.

The fact that SLI performance on these cards is so good means that those with small cases can have near 8800 performance without space problems, those who want DX10 support can get it relatively cheaply with a worthwhile upgrade solution of another card down the line and those who want near 8800 performance with a passive card can now do so.
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SLI in Centrino - just what I wanted to see!!

Well my wishes are partially becoming true! About 10-15 days ago I complained that Intel doesn't have any type of support of SLI technology on their motherboard chipset. But from what I have read before, it isn't Nvidia fault, it's because Intel favours Ati :-(
But it seems things are changing a bit!
This text was just in from Chilehardware... it's translated from Spanish with google services, so you can expect some minor errors in translation


SLI in Centrino By means of the use of southbridge nForce 100 in its future platform Santa Rosa, Intel tries to give complete portable computer support of great size (DTR: Desktop Replacements) with configurations NVIDIA SLI. Historically Intel has decided to become attached to configurations multiGPU of the deceased ATi Technologies, that is to say, CrossFire, and not because they were not according to seating to talk with NVIDIA, but rather because these last ones preferred to exclusively offer this type of graphical acceleration in their own logics for plates mothers. Nevertheless after which ATi was bought by AMD, the conversations retook importance and the first officially sera boarded platform the portable one. Let us hope that it is time thing nothing else so that NVIDIA allows that the future plates mothers based on Intel logics for writing-desk are able to make SLI.

Original article (in Spanish)

Heh... why you should use SLI? Because she says so.. :-)

Well we are still waiting for some news from vr-zone.. on announcing the contest winners.

So surfing around the net I found one great article on xfx website, why you should use a pair and not single graphic card :-)

And besides, and one song goes... 'one is the lonliest number' :-)

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ZEROtherm GX700 and GX710

ZEROtherm are a relatively new player in the cooling market. They have a number of different heatsinks including the odd Butterfly range and flower coolers; all of which feature at least one heatpipe. Today I have two of their universal GPU coolers, let’s see how they perform…

These coolers are compatible with pretty much all of the ATI and nVidia cards on the market bar 8800’s:
Geforce 6600 series (not AGP)
Geforce 7600 series
Geforce 6800 series
Geforce 7800 series
Geforce 7900 series

The lack of support for 8800’s is not only due to the mounting hole positions, but the fact that these aren’t the biggest coolers in the world. The 8800 series is very hot, hence the ridiculously sized stock cooler that you get with it.

I didn’t even need the manual to install it was that easy. It’s done in less than 10 minutes, with most of the time spent removing the old heatpaste.
The cooler is slim enough for it to be used in SLI/Crossfire setups which is good news for gamers.

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ATI RV630 may follow in G84's footsteps

While I've been out in Taiwan, I've been talking with a number of manufacturers about what is coming over the next few months.One of the hottest topics being discussed at the moment is AMD's upcoming R600 family of graphics processing units. Up until Tuesday though, most of the talk was about how R600 was looking; nobody was really willing to talk about AMD's mid-range and low-end chips with any kind of authority. There was obviously a reason for that though, because Nvidia hadn't unveiled its mid-range. That obviously happened on Tuesday, and now AMD's partners can talk with a little bit more confidence about RV630's prospects in the mid-range. At the moment, feelings are somewhat mixed in Taiwan. At least, amongst the various sources that were willing to talk to us about the upcoming parts. So, while our various sources in Taiwan weren't willing to disclose specific performance numbers, they did indicate that we can expect it to be a similar story to GeForce 8600 GTS.
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Two Powerful Gaming Notebooks Compared

A few months back we paired off the Killer Notebooks Executioner against the Eurocom Divine Duo and ended up with some surprising results.
The Killer Notebooks Executioner is back and this time it has an even more powerful graphics chip, the Nvidia GeForce Go 7950GTX (the last time out we tested a unit with Nvidia GeForce Go 7900 GTX). Once again, we've paired it off against a competitor built on an identical chassis and similar specifications, the WidowPC Sting 517D.
As tested, both units had the same chassis, battery, CPU, motherboard and graphics card though they were configured with different memory, cooling and hard drives.

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OCZ GameXStream 1010-watt Power Supply

Over the past few years OCZ has proven itself to be a company that has a tremendous impact on the PC Enthusiast market segment by offering cutting-edge products that provide best of class performance and technology. It’s no wonder then how a company like OCZ can offer its latest 1010-watt power supply at pricing that’s ultra competitive and offers excellent power for just about any hardware scenario you can throw its way.
While most of us in the hardware business often lament over the more “sexy” products such as CPUs and GPUs it doesn’t mean that we should – for a second – forget about the very backbone of what keeps the PC humming along – the power supply. Its chore is a thankless job that so easily is taken for granted; however is ultra crucial to the overall performance and stability of ones PC experience.

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Alienware Aurora 7500-R4

We’ve been visited by two Alienware machines so far; the Aurora 5500 and the Area-51 7500 R3. The Aurora 5500 performed surprisingly well in our evaluation process and received a very respectable overall score. The machine was solid overall and the only major issue we had was that the consumer had to pay a big premium for the Alienware name and design. There was also the landmark event where we were able to actually make the machine smoke.
Out next experience with the Area-51 7500 R3 came at an interesting time since Dell had just acquired Alienware and we were keenly interested to see if anything had changed. The machine remained strong in our performance-based categories, but technical support took a significant nosedive compared to our earlier experience. We ultimately recommended the Area-51 machine, but with reservations given the high price and unimpressive support.

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VARIOUS 8600-8500 GT-GTS CARDS

During the announcement day Of geForce 8500/8600 ( average price range dx 10 solutions ) was also announced many products on base of graphic processors NVIDIA ..

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Scan 3XS OC-GTS Gaming PC

With nVidia launching the GeForce 8600 GTS card today, Scan sent us over a PC incorporating nVidia’s new baby this morning. We generally prefer a bit more notice than a few hours with a review sample, but I thought that this machine was worth making an exception for.
The GeForce 8600 represents nVidia’s mid range, sitting below the flagship 8800 parts. Like the GeForce 8800, the 8600 is fully DirectX 10 compliant, which means you should be reasonably future proof with the upcoming generation of games. But the question is whether the 8600 will actually be up to the task of playing next generation games, even if it is DirectX 10 compliant.

The Abit Fatality FP-IN9 SLI NF650 motherboard makes for a good foundation for the system and offers a decent amount of upgrade potential. The most obvious area for future upgrades is the addition of a second graphics card. There’s an XFX 8600GTS XXX sitting in one of the PCI Express slots, while the other lays empty, waiting for a second card to create an SLI environment. It’s worth noting that this board doesn’t sport twin x16 slots, so if you do go SLI each card will essentially reside in an x8 slot. That said, two 8600GTS cards should be more than happy in this environment, and shouldn’t suffer from the reduced bandwidth. There are also two x1 PCI Express slots, although one will be inaccessible in an SLI setup. Finally there are two free PCI slots below the PCI Express complement.

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The Invincibles: GeForce 8800 GTX Roundup

Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX retain the position of the world’s highest performing graphics adapter. Today we are going to talk about four models of this solution from Asustek Computer, Foxconn, OCZ Technology and XFX and find out what their appealing features are for the hardcore users. Read our new VGA roundup now!
November 2006 Nvidia announced its landmark graphics processor G80 that featured a unified architecture and support of Shader Model 4.0 and next-generation DirectX. The new chip turned out to be very complex, incorporating an unprecedented 681 million transistors. The analog section and TMDS transmitters were moved into a separate chip. The G80 processor became the foundation of the GeForce 8800 graphics card series led by the flagship GeForce 8800 GTX.
In 14 tests out of a total of 23 we used in our review the GeForce 8800 GTX was faster than dual-GPU SLI and CrossFire subsystems based on the fastest graphics cards from the older generation and even faster than a GeForce 7950 Quad SLI system Nvidia had expected so much from.
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Motherboard Roundup: 7 Products On NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI (Socket AM2)

Even though the nForce 680a chipset has been launched already, nForce 590 SLI is still the leading chipset for Socket AM2 — in other words, motherboards based on this chipset are the most rigged retail offers (for early March, 2007). Active promotion of nForce 680a and its competitor-to-be from AMD with similar functions, as well as Quad FX on the whole, generally depends on the launch of AMD quad-core processors. They will certainly be more interesting to the target audience of such systems, who is keen on breaking records, than modern dual-core Athlon 64 FX processors of the 70th series. Prices are not important, because the radical philosophy rarely takes into account such a boring factor as the price/performance ratio.


At the same time, nForce 590 SLI-based motherboards are getting more and more practical: initially high prices are going down, and the cost of these functional motherboards has become quite attractive. It goes without saying that there is a point in buying a motherboard with SLI support (especially based on the top chipset) only if you are interested in modern 3D games or if you build a graphical station and need expanded peripheral functionality of this chipset.

If you have a High-End video card (or even a SLI system), you can play games no matter whether you have a processor for $250 or $500. The inverse is also true — if you save on a video card, you'll have to reduce video settings accordingly, regardless of your CPU. Now what concerns the comparison of competing platforms. Equally-priced Core 2 Duo and Athlon 64 X2 processors demonstrate similar performance. But if you compare platforms in general, you'll find out that motherboards with nForce 590 SLI-like functions for AMD are always cheaper than those for Intel.

However, we are not going to persuade our readers, we'll test motherboards and draw conclusions. We have tested many nForce 590 SLI-based motherboards. So this article will sum our reviews up. So it's comparision of Asus, Ecs, Foxconn, Gigabyte and Msi motherboards!

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XFX Redefines Motherboards with the nForce® 650i Ultra

Overclocking is no longer the exclusive realm of veteran gaming enthusiasts, thanks to the recent release of the XFX 650i Ultra motherboard. This new NVIDIA® nForce® 650i media and communications processor (MCP) comes enabled with comprehensive overclocking tools for greatly expanded performance right out of the box.
Specifically, the nForce® 650i Ultra MCP will immediately expand the power of a user’s PC. The motherboard features NVIDIA® nTune™ utility, which enables users to adjust CPU and memory speeds without rebooting. Users also can access most BIOS settings from inside Windows and are able to save and automatically load profiles for each application that is run.

The 650i Ultra also features a state-of-the-art Dual DDR2 memory controller that ensures that data and information are relayed through the user’s system super fast for incredible performance.
In addition, the motherboard comes with NVIDIA® FirstPacket™ technology, which gives users crystal-clear phone conversations and exceptional online gaming performance. Game data, VoIP conversations and large file transfers are delivered based on preferences established by the user through an intuitive wizard.
Other outstanding features include NVIDIA® MediaShield™ Storage, Multiple Disk Setup, DiskAlert, RAID Morphing, Bootable Multidisk Array, four SATA 3Gb/s drives, High Definition Audio and USB 2.0.
To learn more about the XFX nForce® 650i Ultra or to locate a participating e-tailer, go to www.xfxforce.com.

And ofcourse - official Press release from.. -NVIDIA Brings Cutting-Edge DirectX 10 Graphics and HD Video to All PC Users

Features and Performance of GeForce® 8 Series Now Available at Lower Price Points

NVIDIA Corporation, the worldwide leader in programmable graphics processor technologies, today announced the extension of the award-winning NVIDIA GeForce 8 Series line-up to include three new graphics processing units (GPUs), bringing high-resolution gaming, stunning Microsoft® Windows VistaTM graphics, and stellar HD DVD and Blu-ray video playback to virtually everyone regardless of budget. The new GPUs that complete the world’s first top-to-bottom family of DirectX® 10 GPUs include:
NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS ­ $199-229
NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT ­ $149-159
NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT ­ $89-129
These three GPUs join the previously announced NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX and GeForce 8800 GTS, rounding out the product family.
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Be sure to check out the podcast, where NVIDIA product manager Justin Walker discusses the GeForce 8 family of graphics processors.