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Benchmarking:
We tested Zotac's reference clocked 8600 GT Zone Edition card. Zotac only changed the cooling which is now passive and silent. Core is clocked at 540MHz, and the memory works at 700MHz.
During tests, we got slightly better performance than with the reference Geforce 8600 GT card. Our first thought was that card has a higher Shader clock, but after the check we found out that it is also reference clocked at 1.180MHz.
The only difference between Zotac's 8600 GT Zone and our Nvidia 8600GT reference card is the fresh BIOS on Zotac's card. Zotac's BIOS dates from July, and it is clearly better that the March dated one on the reference card.
All the Game Benchmarks were done on maximum settings, while the 3DMarks were tested on default settings.
The overclocked card was working at 674MHz for the core, and 735MHz for the memory.
Futuremark benchmark
Unfortunately we only had one reference Geforce 8600 GT card so we don't know if this new BIOS really has that much advantage when compared to some of the new Nvidia Geforce 8600GT cards.
Zotac 8600 GT Zone does well with a core and memory clock boost. Don't forget that good airflow is a must, since the cards cooling depends mostly on a healthy airflow.