XFX GeForce 8600GT Fatal1ty Profess1onal Series

When it comes to designing the box art of their products, XFX have refined the process to an art. The package undoubtedly has the most hardcore description text of all the cards we have reviewed to date. Words like “deadly”, “pumping blood” and “hazardous” are sure to catch the attention of everyone who takes a minute to examine the box in a store. Truth be told, we half expected to find a loaded gun inside the box, regardless of the transparent hole on the back of the box, showcasing a part of the graphics cooler. Our homicidal tendencies were put to a stop once we examined the contents of the package though. A quick setup guide, the driver CD, a DVI-to-VGA converter and a TV-Out cable were the only things included, not counting the card. Usually we wouldn’t really care, but with a packaging so aggressive, we hoped for something more substantial.

Back when we reviewed the XFX 8600GT XXX we were very impressed with the card. Not only did the card look great due to the black PCB, but the minuscule cooler performed well above expectations, keeping the card cool regardless of the high overclock XFX used. Well, if anyone had a chance to beat the XXX card it was XFX themselves – you guessed it, the Fatal1ty card looks better (how can it not, it’s even blacker than the XXX was), is absolutely silent and is a tad faster thanks to the 100Mhz memory clock increase in memory speed (bringing it up to 1700Mhz DDR). We were hoping for an additional GPU core speed increase, but because of the passive cooler XFX decided to remain with 620Mhz. The shader clocks also remained unchanged, meaning 1355Mhz instead of the stock 1190Mhz a standard GT card would have.

Looking at the memory we see that XFX are using 256MB of Samsung 707 k4j52324qe-bc12 chips. We have concerns with this, as XFX are running them 50/100mhz over spec (1600mhz modules running at 1700mhz), and on a passively cooled card this could well be a recipe for disaster. We spoke with Matthew Wright in XFX about this. He took the time to give us a reply :

"XFX Pride ourselves, in our ability to take a reference design product from Nvidia, enhance the cooling designs on the PCB, and overclock the GPU to the maximum possible speeds. To do this we use the very best DRAM in the market, to overclock, as an example the Fatal1ty card in question runs at 620 core clock and the 1.7 ghz memory clock speed, optimized and tested for this card to run stable and be supported with our warranty support (2 years)."

With regards to the cooler you can see from the pictures that it relies heavily on heat-pipes to pump away all the excess heat the GPU generates. The first and second picture also point out a potential weakness of the design, as the cooler might prevent the card from fitting into some of the small home theater cases. Taking the cooler into consideration the card is still substantially shorter than any of the higher end cards.

When it comes to the connectors on the Fatal1ty 8600GT there are no surprises. The two Dual-DVI connectors still use the same aggressive green plastic (which incidentally still looks hardcore) and the TV-Out connector is right where we left it. As with the XXX the card supports HDCP over DVI, something that some GT cards aren’t capable of.