Test system

In our original 8600GT review we decided to stick with a slower system, to see how the card would perform in a real life situation. This time that wasn’t really possible. Because of the brutality of the card we simply had to stick it into a high-end system and let the beast loose. Perhaps we went a bit too far, but we didn’t want to make Mr. Fatal1ty angry by putting one of his cards in anything but the best.

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 @ 2.66Ghz
Motherboard: Asus P5N-E SLI
Audio: Onboard audio chip – Realtek High Definition Audio
Memory: 2 x 1 GB OCZ Gold 800Mhz DDR2 memory
Graphics cards: XFX 8600GT XXX – Forceware 158.45 (Vista)
Operating system used: Windows Vista Ultimate, fully updated
Oblivion
Supreme Commander
Tomb Raider Anniversary
F.E.A.R.
Dark Messiah of Might and Magic
Counter Strike: Source
Red Orchestra

The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then Windows Vista was installed. Following the completion of the installations, the Nvidia drivers were installed. All windows updates were then installed as were the latest builds of the benchmarking tools. Finally, the hard drive was de-fragmented. For each test, the Nvidia drivers were set to default quality/optimizations (unless otherwise stated).

Good Benchmarking Practice:
Where possible, each benchmark was performed 3 times and the median result for each resolution/setting is shown in the tables that will follow. All applications had their latest patches applied and all hardware features the latest BIOS/Firmware.