EVGA GeForce 8600 GTS 512MB Superclocked vs. 256MB "standard" card
Does size matter? The answers will surprise you.

Introduction

EVGA is a familiar name to most PC hardware enthusiasts and are known for their lifetime warranties and 90 days setup-up program. They were founded in 1999 and are located in California. This past year they have made a name for themselves in the motherboard low end and high end enthusiast market with their motherboards based on NVIDIA nForce 680i chipset.

In this evaluation we will be looking at the EVGA GeForce 8600 GTS 512MB Superclocked in comparison to an EVGA GeForce 8600 GTS 512MB non-Superclocked as well as an NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB.

The EVGA 8600 GTS 512MB Superclocked features 512MB of GDDR3 video memory; that is double the standard 256MB for this GPU. We want to know if 512MB will really affect the gameplay experience in a positive way with this level of GPU. What we are going to do is test this video card in comparison to a standard 256MB GeForce 8600 GTS at the same clock speeds to see if memory size will affect performance at all.

The moniker “Superclocked” indicates that this video card is “highly” factory overclocked; at least you would think so. The EVGA 8600 GTS 512MB Superclocked’s GPU is running at 706 MHz (31 MHz over the reference design of 675 MHz). The video card memory, however, is not factory overclocked at all. The memory comes clocked at precisely 2016 MHz (1008 MHz actual), which is the reference memory frequency for GeForce 8600 GTS cards.

Overall, these overclocking frequencies are highly underwhelming. When we think of "Superclocked" we expect more than 31 MHz on the GPU and no overclock what-so-ever of the memory. To compare the advantage of EVGA’s “Superclocked” we will compare the EVGA 8600 GTS 512MB Superclocked to EVGA’s own standard clocked 8600 GTS 512MB by downclocking our Superclocked to the non-Superclocked speeds. We want to know if the extra $20 the Superclock carries ($259.99) versus the standard clocked 512MB ($239.99) is worth it.

If you would like to read more about the GeForce 8600 GTS architecture you can read here.

Read all about it here, courtesy of HardOCP.com

Eric