MSI targets a niche market ... the cost conscience gamer. Will the NX8600GTS OC with an overclocked GPU be enough?

Introduction

The mainstream market is now becoming more and more competitive. It is in this market that major manufacturers make their money. The more affordable a product, the more the consumers will buy it and therefore boosting profits. You know as well as I do, that enthusiast products not only looks great, but also producing great performance and results. However, it is not always everyday that consumers can afford such a product, and with this in mind manufacturers have come up with an alternative. Why not take an affordable mainstream product and increase and boost its performance.

         

Many manufacturers have already done this, and we've seen a lot of products on the market, especially graphic cards with overclocked GPU cores, higher speed memory and enhanced cooling. This makes a lot of sense if you think about it. A high end graphics card for example a Nvidia Geforce 8800GTX would set you back £300-£350, while a more affordable mainstream card (i.e. 8600GT/8600GTS) would cost in the region of £95-£120 ... that's less than half of a high end card, so do the math.

OK, a mainstream card may not produce the same kind of results or performance as a high end card, but what it does offer is the support for the latest technologies such as DirectX 10. Affordability and compatibility also counts.

 

Nvidia has done very well this year, releasing their G80 series of GPUs and its variants. They took advantage of ATi/AMD's delayed release of their R600 with great effect. They were the first to produce a graphics card that fully supports DirectX 10 with Forceware drivers supporting Windows Vista.

In this review, we will be taking a look at MSI's NX8600GTS OC graphics card. It's based on Nvidia's Geforce 8600GTS and is equipped with 256Mb of DDR3 ram. It has full support for DirectX 10, and through Nvidia's Forceware drivers it also support both Windows XP and Vista. What makes this card so different, is that it uses an overclocked G84 GPU running at 700Mhz. It also features a powerful heatsink and fan to cool the GPU, taking up 2 PCI slot spaces when fully installed.

         

The card should perform better than a standard Geforce 8600GTS, but for the serious gamer, I feel it might not be enough when compared against its bigger brother the Geforce 8800GTS.

OK, lets not waste any more time and see how well the MSI NX8600GTS OC performs against other cards on the market.