MSI GeForce 8500 GT and 8600 GT Comparison - Page 4 of 8
Review By Jonathan Martini - July 13, 2007
SYSTEM CONFIGURATION
I tested the two MSI GeForce 8 series cards on a modern system (Core2Duo) to eliminate any bottlenecks that may have been presented from the XFX GeForce 8500 GT review, where I tested with a an older system (P4) in order to examine the card within a more "real-world" typical system layout.
Test System
Intel Core2Duo E6600 (2.4Ghz) Processor
ASUS P5N-E SLI (nForce 650i) Motherboard
Mushkin 2GB (1GB x2) XP2 DDR-II Memory
PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 510 SLI
Seagate 250 GB SATA HDD
Dell 2405FPW LCD Monitor
MSI GeForce 8500 GT (NX8500GT-TD256E)
MSI GeForce 8600 GT OC (NX8600GT-T2D256E OC)
NVIDIA ForceWare 158.22 Drivers at Quality Image Setting
Windows XP Professional 32-Bit with Service Pack 2 / DirectX 9.0c
Test Applications
3DMark06 - v1.1.0
Counter-Strike: Source
Doom 3 - v1.3.1
F.E.A.R. - v1.08
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition Demo - DirectX9
3DMark06
Results in 3DMark06 were obtained from the free version of the benchmarking utility.
3DMark06 - MSI GeForce 8500 GT
3DMark06 - MSI GeForce 8600 GT OC
While I don't want to put too much emphasis on results from a single fixed-option 3DMark06 run, the detailed test results display an extremely large performance gap between the MSI GeForce 8500 GT and the 8600 GT OC. The results of both graphics tests and HDR tests have the 8600 GT OC performing at more than twice the performance of the 8500 GT. While we are comparing a standard clocked 8500 GT with an overclocked 8600 GT, this performance delta is... quite simply... huge!
