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eVGA e-GeForce 8600 GT 256 MB Superclocked edition
Info: evga.comPrice: 169.99 USD

Last week NVIDIA launched it's new mid-range DX10 ready GPUs. We already wrote a nice long article which included six products based on these new GPUs. None-the-less over the coming weeks more board-partners will submit their boards to us for a review. eVGA actually submitted two samples of their product for that review... yet one product was delivered delayed and the other... well when I wrote this introduction it was still lost in that lovely logistical infrastructure from the United States Postal Office.

Missing card or not... I made it a priority to have at the very least this one board we received from eVGA reviewed. It's based on the much more budget friendly GeForce 8600 GT product. Armed at a sub 150 USD price tag it comes packed with features and decent gaming performance. Obviously eVGA like many of the board partners has a special "overclock" range of products in their product line, and so is this product. It's labeled like it's Superman going faster drifting mid-air ... "Superclocked".

We'll quickly discuss the new product line and then dive deeply into the eVGA eGeForce 8600 GT Superclock.

As you probably have learned by now NVIDIA launched three new DirectX 10 compatible GPU's in the consumer segment of the market; the GeForce 8600GTS, 8600GT and 8500GT graphics processors. NVIDIAs GeForce 8600GTS and 8600GT are G84-based GPUs and are targeted at the mid-range market. The lower-positioned G86-based GeForce 8500GT serves as the flagship low to mid-range graphics card.

The new product line is going to look like this:

• GeForce 8800 GTX
• GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB
• GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB
• GeForce 8600 GTS
• GeForce 8600 GT
• GeForce 8500 GT
• GeForce 7600 GS
• GeForce 7300 GT
• GeForce 7300 LE
• GeForce 7100 GS

As you can see, a lot of current DX9 graphics cards are going to be EOL (end of life) as the DX10 parts will replace them completely.

But wait, there's more. The OEM market will see two low-budget cards as well. There's hardy any specs available on them but they'll be the GeForce 8400 GS and 8300 GS with 450 MHz core clocks and 400 MHz memory clocks. Again, these two GPUs will only show up in OEM systems and probably will (likely) never make an appearance in your local hardware store. Next page please.