Radeon HD 2600 XT vs. GeForce 8600 GT

Asus EN8600GT

Manufacturer: Asus
UK Price (as reviewed): £70.27 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed): $134.99 (ex. Tax)
Core Clock: 540MHz
Memory Clock: 1400MHz
Warranty: Three years (parts and labour)

The Asus GeForce 8600 GT we’ve got here is a standard-clocked version, but there is a new overclocked version that comes with OC Gear – the company’s real-time overclocking device. Despite the fact it’s a standard-clocked card, Asus has decided to implement its own cooling design onto the EN8600GT – this takes up two slots.

The cooler bears resemblance to some of Zalman’s VF-series graphics card cooling solutions and the cooler’s 70mm fan is at least as quiet as what we’ve seen from Zalman, too. The heatsink itself is made of aluminium and has been anodised gold for effect.

Asus has dyed the PCB blue and, instead of using 100 percent solid aluminium capped capacitors, half the capacitors are electrolytic. This is a case of Asus reducing the cost of production with cheaper capacitors but fear not though, as they’re good quality capacitors. The card is considerably smaller than its direct competition at just 175mm long – 50mm smaller than the Sapphire HD 2600 XT GDDR4 we’re pitting it against here.


There are two DVI ports on the rear port cluster – curiously, Asus’ site says that one is dual-link capable, while the second only supports resolutions up to 1920x1200 (digital) or 2048x1536 (analogue). However, we decided to put this to the test with our 30” Dell 3007WFP and found that, in actual fact, both of the ports are dual-link capable and were happy running the Dell at its native resolution of 2560x1600. To round off the port cluster, there’s also a TV-out DIN connector.

Interestingly, this card was unable to play back either Blu-ray or HD DVD movies because PowerDVD 7.3 Ultra was unable to activate HDCP. We spoke to both Asus and Nvidia about this problem and both came back with similar responses. We got this card quite early on and at that point in time, HDCP wasn’t mandatory on the GeForce 8600 GT.

However, Nvidia decided a month or so ago (after we started testing for this particular review) that it would make HDCP compliance a required feature on all GeForce 8-series cards – this is something we’ve been pushing for quite some time now, so it’s good to see that Nvidia has finally taken feedback on board and made HDCP a requirement. Asus has since changed its card’s specifications to comply with Nvidia’s updated specs, which include an HDCP crypto-ROM by default.


As we mentioned on the previous page, Nvidia’s G84 graphics chip is around 170mm² in size, which is slightly bigger than AMD’s RV630 graphics chip despite having fewer transistors under the hood. Of course, that’s down to the different process nodes used – AMD has used a new 65nm process, while Nvidia’s G84 chip is fabbed on an 80nm process, making the transistors around 23 percent larger.

There are four Samsung DRAM chips on the card that are rated to 1.4 nanoseconds or 714MHz (1428MHz effective). Since Asus has clocked the memory on its card to 1400MHz, they’re running at close to their maximum rated speed – this was also the case on Sapphire’s Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4.

Moving onto the bundle, there are a few things of interest. Firstly, Asus has opted to only include the one DVI-to-VGA converter, which is an annoyance on one front, but understandable on another. There are quite a few hardcore enthusiasts that still use analogue monitors and it’d be nice to see these guys catered for… however, on the other hand those that are still using analogue monitors probably still have DVI-to-VGA converters from a previous graphics card purchase.

In addition to the DVI-to-VGA converter, there is also a component cable, a leatherette disc organizer, a driver CD, a multi-lingual manual (soft copy) and a quick install guide. This makes the bundle adequate, but certainly not complete – I guess one expects this from a sub-£100 graphics card.

Warranty:

Asus offers a three year limited warranty covering parts and labour with all of its graphics card range. In order to repair the card, you have to contact your reseller. You could say the card is warranted for a reasonable lifetime of the product, but it is not a true lifetime warranty. The point of contact for support is the place where you purchased the video card in the first year. After that, you should contact Asus if you're having problems with your purchase.