Conclusion
The NX8600GTS-T2D256E-HD-OC finds itself occupying a difficult market segment.
Not only are there faster cards available for the same money, but as we've seen today there are faster cards available for significantly less money.
What's more, the G71 GPU that forms the basis of the GeForce 7900GS is a larger chip than the G84; both feature a similar transistor count, but with the G84 being built on 80nm compared to the 90nm of the G71.
This should mean, yields permitting, that a G84 should cost less to produce than a G71, so why the £40 price premium in the wrong direction?
This most probably isn't MSI's fault, although we shall have to see how its SRP compares to the actual selling price through the various retailers along with those of their competitors' cards. MSI is to be commended for shipping an overclocked card straight out of the gate.
The GeForce 8600GTS just doesn't seem to be able to provide the raw grunt to allow it to compete with likes of the GeForce 7900GS or Radeon X1950PRO.
If anything it seems as if NVIDIA has been a little conservative. G84 has to make do with a 128-bit memory interface and still try to take the fight to cards equipped with a 256-bit bus.
Even with a 33-50% memory clock-speed advantage it still can't make up the bandwidth deficit, and from there on it's fighting an uphill battle. GDDR3 capable of 2GHz+ can't be cheap either and so limiting the memory controller seems like something of a false economy.
There now appears to be a large gap in the NVIDIA lineup with respect to number of Stream Processors; the 8600GTS making do with a third as many as the 8800GTS. While these have been tweaked for improved efficiency and run at a higher clock-speed compared to the G80-based parts, a lack of raw power counts against it.
In an ideal world we would be looking at an 8600GTS with a 256-bit memory interface and 48 or 64 Stream Processors, if it was to slot in between the GeForce 7900GS and 8800GTS 320MB in terms of both price and performance. Really, we should be looking at a card that's half a G80, not a third. It won the high-end not by being the first card to support DirectX 10 but by offering the fastest performance in what people play today, and the 8600 should be able to do the same in its market segment.
There are certain niche applications where it is the only GPU out there up to the task, and it features possibly the most comprehensive hardware-accelerated video-decoding engine currently on the market, but whereas the 8800GTX moved the goalposts for high-end performance the 8600GTS simply fails to do the same for the mid-range.
NVIDIA need the reduced die size and the lower bill of materials to make up the numbers while still ticking all the necessary feature boxes. This feels like a SKU to sell via OEMs to the masses who know a DirectX 10 card must be better than a DirectX 9 one because the sales literature says so, and after the success of the enthusiast-oriented favorites, the GeForce 6600GT and 7600GT, this is a shame. NVIDIA will make a tidy profit without a doubt, yet you can't help but feel that NVIDIA's mid-range offerings have lost their soul.
MSI NX8600GTS-HD-OC
