OSNews

I disagree. I spent a week reading gaming reviews online, and I haven't heard a bad word about it. It is not a slow budget card. According to gaming reviews elsewhere, it is middle-to-high-end.

For my own needs, as a videographer, it does the job perfectly. And that's why I wrote about it.

You should have read Anandtech, then. They don't exactly come out and say it's horrible, but they do say it was disappointing and they expected more. At least on the gaming side - the multimedia performance is quite good. Calling it one of the best is a little misleading IMHO, unless you specifically state that you're talking about multimedia capabilities and not gaming. Anyway, you're clearly enjoying it and that's what really matters I suppose.

The bottom line is that the 8600 really doesn't offer what we would expect from a next generation midrange part. While on its own the 8600 series is not bad hardware, NVIDIA needs to rely on more than its feature set to sell its product. This is especially true when DX10 games are not abundant and fairly few people are even running an operating system which supports DX10.

The GeForce 6600 GT outperformed the Radeon 9800 Pro in virtually every benchmark, sometimes by large margins. It managed this with prices that were at the time quite a bit lower than the previous generation's champ. GeForce 7600 GT was also typically faster than GeForce 6800 GT/GS, and it once again came with a lower price tag. The 8600 hardware on the other hand doesn't appear significantly faster or cheaper than the cards it's replacing..

Even if we can't expect new hardware at a particular price point to blow away the competition, we would at least like to see a consistently better performance than similarly priced previous generation hardware. Our follow up benchmarks confirm that we simply don't get this from the 8600 series. For users who want the highest performance for their money, the 8600 series is not the answer. If you can live without full H.264 decoding support and you still want DirectX 10, the 8800 GTS 320 is currently so much faster than the 8600 GTS that we would recommend spending the extra ~$75.


Edited 2007-07-19 15:18

I have to agree with you. I was puzzled at the comment of it being one of the best. I don't see any compelling reason to put it into that category.

Wording... if it would say one of the best in price/performance for this particular purpose, or just best for this purpose, or not even using "best" since it's really not compared to anything but saying good/nice/well performing for this purpose for such a price, well, then I don't think anyone would've commented anything. But.

[quote]presenting the 8600GTS as "one of the best video cards on the market today" is just odd. It's a budget card, and not a highly recommended one. It's for example not mentioned on Tom's Hardware "Best Gaming Cards for the Money[/quote]

Eugenia was reviewing its multimedia playback capabilities. The 8800(gts/gtx/ultra) doesn't have H.264 decoding support, making the 8600gts just about nVidia's best card with that playback capability she was reviewing (you'll note her comment "gaming aside, etc").

Tom's doesn't have any 8600 GTS in their VGA charts. There's nothing to back up their claim as to what is good for the money. They spent time coming up with a list, but not showing how or why the list is worth anything.

Digit-life's digests are for more useful, and with less text to boot. But, they don't spoon-feed a list of, "if your wallet is this thick, buy this card." Unfortunately for Tom's guys, non-gaming features and other concerns (like noise--I can get nothing faster than a 8600GTS that's silent) often matter, in which case game FPS is still important, but not everything.

But, yeah, this is why OSNews shouldn't try to be a PC hardware upgrade site .