Reviews for MSI GeForce 8600GTS Graphics Card

Fantastic, but large

Strengths: Incredibly fast silent excellent support

Weakness: takes up a lot of room needs external power

I really love this card (using it on XP). The only down side is that it takes a lot of room -- basically you lose the slot to the left of it and to the right of it. Since the x17 PCIe slot is usually the closest one to the CPU, this may also limit your choice of heatsinks -- on my Asus m2n-e card, I couldn't use a thermaltake V1 cooler because this video card's heatsink didn't leave it room!

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Great DX10 video card for the money

Strengths: DX10 compatible; HDCP; silent cooling (heat-pipe); off-loads HDTV decoding

Weakness: Big!

I was looking for a reasonably priced DX10 compatible video card for a HTPC, and this seems to be the one! One of my requirements was for it to be quiet, which this certainly is. I replaced my 7800GT card with this one, and I cannot believe how much quieter my system is! I cannot believe how loud the fan was on my 7800 card. The card does seem to be steady, but I have yet to find a utility to monitor the temperature of the card, in order to make sure that I'm not over-heating it. My computer is, afterall, inside a locked closet with so-so cooling.

While I don't need the feature now, these 8500/8600 nVidia series cards do some HD decoding if you have HD-DVD or BlueRay DVDs to decode. I got this feature in order to be future proof. I also wanted it to be HDCP compliant for the same reason.

I did have some stability issues early on, but that was circumvented once I downloaded the latest drivers from MSI. I only wish they provided a heat monitor!!

Be forewarned that this thing is WIDE! It takes up alot of room for the heat-pipe mechanism. I was sure to pre-measure, in order to insure that any motherboard components wouldn't be in the way.

I like that it has two DVI outputs, as I plugged one into my Panasonic 1080p projector, and another into my RCA 1080i DLP projection TV. HDMI connectors would have been preferred, but converters are easy to come by.

The retail package did not come with any games, which surprised me, as MSI has all sorts of claims of being a gaming company! With that said, I am not planning on using games on this, so game performance is not important to me. Heck, it is probably overkill for what I need!

I set it up with the highest resolution, and it looked awesome when I played MediaCenter ripped DVDs on my projector!!

I am giving it 4/5 stars because I had install problems with the drivers, and for limited documentation on the MSI web-site. Everytime I booted my Windows XP computer, it kept giving me install warnings about the drivers. I had to un-check the box to prevent these warnings from occurring. Only wish they put this info in the install guide.

Update on 6/26/07: I was still having stability issues, where the computer would reboot on its own when in standby, or when I was doing nothing. I would also get a "wavy" image. After the self-reboot, windows would indicate an unknown driver issue. I did some research, and found that the MSI Live software has some compatibility issues with Media Center. I uninstalled it, and things seem to be better now. I'd oftentimes get warning messages about non-optimized screen resolution, when it was set at the optimal 1080p resolution for my projector.

Oh, and after some more hunting, I was able to apply some add-ons to the nvidia software that would allow for better temperature and performance monitoring. That adds some value to this card for me, as it identified that the card is getting hot, and that I need better airflow.

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good for HTPC

Strengths: quiet,works great for HDTV, good performance on most of current games

Weakness: overheat after playing game for a long time

The card looks cool and is absolutely quiet because of it passive heatsink. However if you are game fans, this card is not a good choice. After playing C&C 3 for one hour, the game froze frequently and the temperature went up to 90C.

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ATI Radeon HD 2600XT vs Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS

Looking for the best mainstream videocard we bring you a comparison between the two leading mainstream cards offered by Nvidia and ATI under $200. Results are nonetheless surprising.

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