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Performance

We ran our benchmarks with our usual test settings.  Graphical settings for these games are set to their highest possible values. Notable differences are F.E.A.R where we disable "Soft Shadows", Quake 4 where we use High Quality - not Ultra Quality - anisotropic filtering was set to "1" for default tests and "16" for AA / AF tests. We used Serious Sam II built in "Maximum" quality preset then change resolution and AA / AF settings accordingly. All of these settings can be seen here. Our TES IV: Oblivion settings are as close as we can get to well, basically maxed out details - you can see our test settings here. For Need for Speed: Carbon, we used the game's "Maximum" video quality preset, but change the filtering to "Trilinear" for default tests - AA AF tests are run with "4x" and "Anistropic". NFS: Carbon test were done with the Sprint Race on Lincoln Boulevard.

We'd like to thank Tagan for supplying the additional power supply and Gigabyte for supplying the Gigabyte P965-DS3P for this article. 

Our test setup
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 socket LGA-775 (running at 7 x 400 MHz)
4 x 512 MB A-DATA 5-5-5-18 PC6400 DDR2-SDRAM
Gigabyte P965-DS3P Intel P965 motherboard
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
LiteOn 1673S DVD-RW
Tagan TG530-U15 530 watts ATX/BTX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
NVIDIA Forceware 158.19 BETA reference driver
Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility 8.1.0.1006
DirectX 9.0c
all respected games used for benchmarks have been updated to their latest, final builds.

The graphs are pretty self explanatory, but in case you can't see the text, they're arranged in groups of three colors: green for minimum fps,  blue for average fps and red for maximum fps. The first group of graphs are results taken with default settings - AA and AF is not enabled. The second group of results are results with 4x AA and 16x AF.

The results - GeForce 8600GTS:

Based oun our look at the standard GeForce 8600GTS and 8600GT last month, we now know not to expect performance with AA, particularly above 1024 x 768. If you enable AA and AF, you'll likely only be able to get playable frame rates at 1024 x 768 and below. Even at 1024 x 768, there would be times when frame rates will drop to around 30 fps or below. Forsake AA, and you can get very playable frame rates up to 1280 x 960.

Naturally, the Leadtek PX8600GTS TDH Extreme stands out. It's able to offer the same level of frame rate at 1600 x 1200 and 1024 x 768 with AA and AF. With very little clock increase, the MSI NX8600GTS OC Edition performs basically the same as the standard clocked ASUS EN8600GTS Silent and Gigabyte NX8600GTS Silent Pipe 3. There is that 2 fps difference at 1600 x 1200, but honestly, you don't want to play FEAR at that resolution with this card.

The results seem to point out that the slightly overclocked Leadtek PX8600GTS TDH Extreme is in the lead here, but as we noted that doesn't mean much. If you want fluid frame rates in F.E.A.R, you'll want to keep minimum frame rates above 35 fps and average frame rates above 45 if you can. That sweet spot for the Leadtek PX8600GTS TDH Extreme is at 1280 x 960 without AA and AF, along with the other GeForce 8600GTS cards. 

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