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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