The verdict then; so I have been saying that the GeForce 8600 GTS is priced to high for the performance we get from it. Luckily over the past two weeks prices have come down a little and it's now more affordable at say 180 USD/EUR for a reference (standard) product.

In general speaking, the GTS is a product series for those with a 1024x768 or 1280x1024 pixels sized monitor. It'll offer you decent 3D gaming performance and will allow you to enable AA and AF in most situations as well. We have not discussed this in the article, but obviously the card is a great card for multimedia playback as well. As it has the new video engine, and with PureVideo this thing can decode even the most complex Blu-ray / H.264 bitstreams. You'll decode and enhance HD content over the GPU. That's good stuff. So with the Series products comes a DX10 capable product (backwards compatible obviously). This Inno3D graphics card is offering decent performance up-to a resolution of 1280x1024 in most games which makes it an interesting product for a lot of you on that sub 200 USD/EUR budget.

The two product tested:

The standard GeForce 8600 GTS. This really is a standard product compared to the rest of the cards, it however is priced decent enough to make it the winner of this twofold review. I'll explain that in a tidbit though. There's nothing special about this card other then it offers you decent gaming performance and DX10 compatibility. Priced right it'll be a success, and I love the extended warranty to two years.

The iChill GeForce 8600 GTS. I'm afraid this product is losing today over the reference model. It's not the design, software bundle, warranty and all that stuff... really the card looks great. But the default pre-overclock is very small, to small to make a real difference and stand out to the competition.

Now here's my real problem with the Striker3 cooled iChill product, unless it was malfunctioning the cooler is just not doing the job as expected. We see idle temperatures higher than the reference cooler is showing, the cooler makes just as much noise as the reference cooler and if that isn't bad enough, it even cools worse as we reached 89 degrees C peak temperatures. The next bothersome fact that comes to mind is the fact that this heat from the Striker3 cooler is being dumped inside the PC. For a two-slot cooler that just does not make sense. So I honestly do not see the validity of this cooler other then the fact is looks pretty. I'm sorry Inno3D, but these are the facts.

** Update - after our concern we removed the heatsink and had a look at applied thermal paste, it was a really bad job. We removed and replaced it with good thermal paste. The temperatures dropped immediately to a load temperature of 65 Degrees C. Still that's equal to reference performance, but much better.

Surely it cools enough and you'll love playing games with this card but there's just no real advantage here compared to the standard product while this iChill version is likely 20-30 bucks more expensive. What Inno3D should have done was stick to the AC cooler that we have seen on their 7900 GS iChill product (review here), I guarantee you if that cooler would have been on this product... results would have been great and on top of that the product likely would have received our editors choice award.

I'll leave that cooler as is though as the iChill concept itself is really lovely. So, let's stay in perspective here. While I disagree with the Striker3 cooler, it rest of the features make it a lovely product. Good quality components and a very nice bundle. For the roughly 225 EUR you need to pay for this card you'll get decent performance and thus a nice gaming experience. Lovely is the three year warranty, all in all that's a lot of additional value .. and that really is what the iChill series is all about.

Thanks to Inno3D for providing the cards for this test.

Company: Inno3D
Price: 199 / 225 USD/EUR ex VAT
Info: Inno3D.com