Product Listing

ASUS EN8600GT Silent 256MB GDDR3 (GeForce 8600 GT)

By Vincent Chang - 13 Jul 2007

Conclusion

Conclusion

With ATI's entire Radeon HD lineup launched officially, it seems that the job is done. It also happens to be the end of the line for Dave Orton, former president and chief executive officer of ATI Technologies (before AMD acquired the graphics chipmaker), who has recently resigned as vice president of AMD . Rumors will surely surround his departure, coming so soon after the acquisition. No doubt, there will be fingers pointing to the delays and disappointments about the much-hyped R600 architecture as a possible reason for this. We may never know the real reasons behind this corporate decision but with ATI forced to rely on pricing in order to stay competitive with NVIDIA, such speculation is inevitable.

A case may indeed be made for choosing ATI's Radeon HD graphics cards over NVIDIA's solutions but such a case will probably not be strictly in terms of raw performance, at least not in current DirectX 9.0 games. It must be slightly galling for AMD to be placed in a position similar to its CPU business, where it is playing second fiddle to Intel. But at least, ATI's pricing at the moment does make one pause and consider what's really important for a graphics card. Is it the price performance ratio? Or the less quantifiable elements like features and image quality? In any case, more power to consumers as this makes for some interesting comparisons in the lower and mid-range segment and leading to all manners of custom and unique solutions from vendors.

For some reason, the performance of this ASUS silent edition GeForce 8600 GT falls slightly below expectations. Its main attraction is its noiseless operation but we don't believe that is enough to compensate for its flaws - more so since it commands a premium.

Unfortunately for ASUS, its new silent version of the GeForce 8600 GT may not be making much of a case for NVIDIA. No doubt, the welcome addition of HDCP support brings it level with ATI in terms of a much-publicized feature but where the ASUS seems to be failing is its performance, where it lagged behind the reference card despite having newer drivers. In case you're wondering about the difference in driver versions used, we had also double-checked the performance of the reference card with identical 158.22 drivers after our initial tests and this margin remained the same for 3DMark and other games, leaving us with the conclusion that the ASUS hardware was simply slower, albeit not that noticeable in real world gaming. Perhaps a BIOS update in the future will change that but at the moment, performance won't be a key reason to choose this card.

However, its main highlight, the passive cooler does not exactly perform up to its claim of being cooler than generic boards, unless ASUS is referring to a generic passively cooled GeForce 8600 GT. We have no idea about that since we do not have such a product to compare with (if there's one to begin with) but to its credit, the ASUS did record lower temperatures than the overclocked and passively cooled XFX, so at least it's not without some merit. Consumers will probably appreciate the silent operation of this card along with some of the extra ASUS applications included in the bundle. However they may not like the retail price of this card though, as a check online showed its price of US$142 is not as competitive as some of the other competing reference cards. Is the passive cooler worth the extra US$20? Again, that's up to the individual but for us, we choose to skip and wait for a more worthy contender.

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