Update on NVidia GeForce 8600GTS
posted in Technology, Hardware |I went ahead and bought the Gigabyte SilentPipe GF 8600GTS for my existing media center box. I noticed that the fan had frozen on the existing card in the box and that could certainly explain some of the failures of that machine. Plus I’m hoping that this card will move into the new media center machine in a fairly straightforward way. It was a bit risky to get the Nvidia one before the benchmarks on the ATI Radeon 2600 XT came out. Those benchmarks came out today and the 8600GTS beats the 2600XT in just about every test, although for now they still only have the gaming tests (grrr). The media tests are yet to come, and those are the critical ones I feel for the cards in this price / utility segment.
The NVidia card from Gigabyte has been working great. The construction seems very solid and while it does take two slots it seems to do a good job of cooling without a fan. Somehow while installing it I managed to fry the on-board networking on my media center, so I had to get a card for that. With the two-slot video card I was out of normal PCI slots, but I noticed there was a PCI-express 1-lane slot that was open. Luckly DLink makes a PCI-express ethernet card which has also been working great. Still, it was pretty amazing that there is pretty much only one PCI-express networking card that exists in the market.