Published in Reviews

Club3D 8600GT Passive Heatpipe reviewed

by on28 October 2007

Index



Benchmarking

We compared the Club 3D 8600 GT Passive Heatpipe 512MB GDDR2 against the recently tested Gainward 8600 GT with 1024MB of GDDR2 memory. To see how these GDDR2 cards measure up to GDDR3 equipped cards, we also included the Gainward 8600 GT HDMI in our charts. We also included the results for several ATI Radeon HD2600 series cards.

The Club3D's core is clocked at a reference 540MHz, while Gainward overclocked the GPU to 600MHz. The Gainward outperforms the Club3D card, primarily thanks to the 60MHz clock difference. We don't think that the 1024MB of memory helped the score much.

We used the latest officially available drivers, and in some games we noticed that they weren't performing that well. One of the examples is World in Conflict, where we noticed a huge frame rate difference when activating antialiasing in the game, and doing it directly in the driver.

We used the following components for our test:

Testbed

Motherboard:
EVGA 680i SLI (Supplied by EVGA)

Processor:
Intel Core 2 Duo 6800 Extreme edition (Supplied by Intel)

Memory:

OCZ FlexXLC PC2 9200 5-5-5-18  (Supplied by OCZ)
        na testu CL5-5-5-15-CR2T 1066MHz na 2.2V


Graphics:

Image

 

PSU:
OCZ Silencer 750 Quad Black ( Ustupio OCZ)

Hard drive:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 80GB SATA (Ustupio Seagate)

 

CPU-Cooler:
Freezer 7 Pro (Ustupio Artic Cooling)
 

Case fans:
Arctic Cooling - Artic Fan 12 PWM
Arctic Cooling - Artic Fan 8 PWM


3D Marks
Image

Club 3D Geforce 8600 GT Passive does well in 3Dmark 03. As expected, it's slower than the Gainward card with GDDR3 memory, but it's still faster than the reference clocked ATI HD2600XT on stock clocks. Apart from the Club3D card, GDDR2 memory is used on the Gainward 8600GT with 1024MB, but even the 1024MB doesn't help it much; and the GDDR3 equipped Gainward HDMI outperforms it.

Image

Everything counts in the tests, and the Club3D 8600GT passive fails to impress, thanks to its 540MHz clock and GDDR2 memory. Oddly enough, Jetway's HD2600XT wins this one.

Image

The passively cooled Club 3D is simply not up to the challenge, and it's easily outperformed by GDDR3 memory. The Gainward 8600GT with 1024 MB of memory has a slightly faster core, clocked at 600MHz, but the slow GDDR2 memory is holding it back. As you can see, ATI and Nvidia cards are very closely matched.


Overclocking

Image

Looking at the results, you can probably tell that the OC wasn't that high. The card is passively cooled and it's simply not designed for overclocking, but in spite of that we expected a bit more. Although the core temperature wasn't too high, we managed to raise the GPU clock by less than 5 percent, to just 627MHz. The Samsung memory stays stuck at the 500MHz stock clock. The 5 percent core overclock gives us an extra 336 marks.


Last modified on 29 October 2007
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