Introduction:



Galaxy Technology was established in 1994 as a manufacturing and distributor of computer components. The head office is located in Hong Kong whereas the factory is located in China. Since long, VGA cards is the prime business of the company and year after year Galaxy grows and develops their know-how. As the group of engineers consists mostly of overclockers, they always want to push the card to the edge by providing n°1 class materials and adapt the card to their needs. The Galaxy 8600Ge is a perfect example of know-how and guts to re-invent the standards of the 86xx series.



The 8600Ge is equipped with the latest 1.0 memory chips and is clocked at an astonishing 630/1000Mhz (compare this to 540/700 speeds). Furthermore, Galaxy uses a custom PCB which features an extra power connector and a less PCB layers to keep the card's temperature as low as possible. The 8600 Galaxy Edition is said to be destined for the n°1 spots in every benchmark and should offer excellent price/performance ratio with performance coming close to the more expensive 8600GTS, but price little higher than the average 8600GT.

Specifications :

Let’s see where the 8600GE stands specifications wise compared to the 8600GT and 8600GTS:



The Galaxy 8600GE comes with 17% higher GPU clocks, and an impressive 43% OC on the memory. The Shader clocks can’t be ignored either as they close in on those of the 8600GTS.

Let’s take a closer look at the card ->

A Closer Look

When we open the box, we can find a user manual, a molex to 6-pin power connector, a s-video cable, a s-video to audio converter, a cd with all necessary drivers and of course the card itself.



Let’s take a close look to the card.



The card has a nice design Coolermaster cooler to keep the card from overheating.



Galaxy still offers users to directly attach a D-Sub VGA screen, where many other manufacturers feature two DVI connectors. Of course, there’s a tv out.



Between the cooler and the core, we find a silver cooling paste nicely covering the entire core. The heatsink of the cooler is copper.



The Galaxy 8600GE features an extra 6-pin power connector, the engineers try to maximize the 8600GE’s capabilities when it comes to overclocking. The extra power connector is not standard on 8600GT cards, but is on the 8600GTS card.



This is where the fun kicks in, look at those memory chips. 1ns is good enough for a 1GHz (!) memory clock, which has never been seen on a stock 8600GT.



Looking at the specs tells us that the maximum allowed frequency was obtained by Galaxy. The chips are working at full speed.



Although the standard voltage of the Samsung memory chips is rated at 1.9 or 2.0 volt, Galaxy chooses to give the memory extra juice, 2.05V. Maybe interesting for our volt-modders and extreme benchmarkers: the maximum rated voltage is 2.5v, more than enough to break the standard limits.



We notice two jumpers on the upper left corner of the card. The red one is for enabling/disabling a buzzer which goes off in case of overheating. The blue one is for a project which is still under NDA, but we can tell you it’s a feature which will be loved by overclockers.

Last but not least, the back of the card.



Time to put this card to the test ->

Test Setup and Test Methodology

The test system was installed with Windows XP, the latest official drivers from NVIDIA were used, 162.18.

Massman's Test Setup
CPU	Intel Core 2 E2160 @ 1.8Ghz
Cooling	Intel stock HSF
Mainboard	Asus P5K
Memory	2 * 512MB PC5400 Corsair
Other	Tagan 480W Western Digital 320GB SATA HDD NXTZ Adamas

Benchmarks and Methodology

The 8600 series is a mid-range offering from NVIDIA, don’t expect miracles from it when it comes to running the latest games, you’ll have to settle to low/medium quality settings and resolutions. We hooked up the system to a 19” widescreen 16:10 ratio LCD monitor with native resolution of 1440x900. This allowed us to test games at 1024x768 and 1440x900. We found older games to be perfectly playable at medium/high settings at the monitor’s native resolution.

These are the benchmarks, both synthetic and games, to evaluate the performance of the Galaxy 8600GE:

3DMark2001SE

3DMark03

3DMark05

3DMark06

AquaMark3

The Futuremark should give us a general idea of where the card will fit in the “large scheme”, we then proceeded with a series of game benchmark to see if the outcome was different compared to the synthetic benchmarks:

F.E.A.R. (in-game benchmark)

Prey (Hardware OC Bechmark Tool)

Quake 4 (Hardware OC Bechmark Tool)

Bioshock Demo (Fraps manual run-through)

Colin MCrae: DiRT (Fraps manual run-through)

While the 8 series if DX10 capable we have not switched over the new Vista platform yet, waiting for a more polished experience (SP1) and the lack for a real reason to switch, as DX10 is not offering any tangible image quality or performance improvements over DX9.

Overclocking the Galaxy on Air

An interesting part of any review nowadays is the overclocking potential, seeing as the Galaxy was build by overclockers we had high expectations. For comparison we included an 8600 GT at reference speed, a Calibre 8600 GT model which comes with 512Mb and factory overclocked. In the overview below we re-included the specifications of the 8600GTS.

Using Rivatuner 2.0 or ATI Tool the 8600GE could be overclocked easily, as we kept an eye on the load temperatures we increased the GPU and Memory clocks until the system became unstable. The Coolermaster provided HSF certainly did a good job at keeping the core cool enough, we ended up with this overclock:



A ~13% overclock on the GPU is enough to push the speed beyond that of the 8600 GTS, the memory is already running close to the limit and could only be pushed another 10%. Also note the increased Shader clock, at 1566 it’s running well beyond the reference speed and should provide a nice boost.

Here's our reference chart for the GPU/Shader relation as the speed goes up, unlike the previous generation video cards, the GPU and Shader clocks increase in jumps, rather than by 1Mhz at a time:



Synthetic benchmarks next ->

Synthetic 3D Benchmarks:

These synthetic 3D benchmarks from Futuremark allow you to evaluate the expected performance of a system with different generation games. As each 3DMark uses different feature and quality settings, it allows you to get an idea of how a video card will perform in games. But be aware that since Futuremark takes DirectX guide lines to build their stress tests with all features available, performance can differ from real world games when those games don’t fully support/implement all DX features. So take these results with a grain of salt, and always compare them to our game benchmarks.



Let's start with the latest Futuremark benchmark: 3DMark06, equipped with the latest technology, this benchmark pushes the video cards to their limits.



As you can see, both Calibre and Galaxy card have a ~20% gain over a default 8600GT. The 190MHz memory boost of the Galaxy card doesn't add much, but it's something. When we crank the speeds of the Galaxy even higher, there's an even nice boost. Note that these numbers are highly affected by the limits of the E2160 CPU.



A similar situation when we test the video cards with the 3DMark05 benchmark: 190Mhz of extra memory doesn't really help that much, but once we overclock the Galaxy card even higher, we have a nice gain over the 630/810 clocked Sparkle Calibre.



Once again, the overclocked Galaxy 8600Ge leaves the other cards behind, scoring ~25% higher than a default 8600GT!

Although 3DMark01 and Aquamark3 are heavily influenced by the performance of the CPU and memory configuration, we still want to give you the full numbers.




Now let's find out what the cards are capable of in games ->

F.E.A.R.

F.E.A.R. is not a new title anymore as it was released in October 2005, however, this game still has splendid visuals, even today it you run it high detail it doesn’t look dated at all. You pay a price to get the visual splendor though; a high end card is required to run it fluently at high detail and increased resolution.



We ran the in-game benchmark at maximum details, FSAA 4x, AF 16x at a resolution of 1280x960.(19" widescreen rescaled this resolution dynamically). The more FPS, the better of course. These numbers are the average numbers, we never stumbled on a big frame drop with any of these cards.



As you can see, a default 8600GT has just enough power to render the game fluently. When overclocking the card, we notice how an extra 190Mhz on the memory does not really help, whereas 90Mhz extra core speed helps a lot.

Prey:

Prey uses the venerable game engine from ID software, Tech4 it’s called now, also used for Doom 3 and Quake 4. Prey started development back in 1995, and it took 11 years to see this project come to completion, but when it finally was launched, gamers were pleased with such beautiful graphics.



With the help of the HardwareOC Prey benchmark utility, we tested the card's performance. Once again, we chose to stress the video cards as high as possible, using the 1440x900 resolution, highest detail settings, AF 16x and FSAA 4x. For those who want to compare: we used the Guru3D demo.



For the first time, we see the 190Mhz boost paying of: almost 2fps average! An overclocked Galaxy 8600Ge manages to lift the fps up by 33%, impressive to say the least.

Quake 4

Quake 4 was released in 2006, based on the popular Doom 3 engine from ID Software. Even with the latest video cards, this game is a hard nut to crack if running in highest possible settings. Luckily, if you're able to play at the highest settings is so astonishing you never want to downgrade your card again.



We ran a custom-made time demo featuring the first level with one-to-one combat and outdoor scenes. The resolution we chose was again 1440*900, but this time we didn't use the maximum details (ultra settings), because these were designed for 512MB cards. Unfortunately, both the Galaxy and Sparkle video card were unable to render the game fluently enough to be 100% playable. So we set the details at high, AA 8x and FSAA 4x. SMP was enabled.



Once again, the extra memory clocks do the trick, giving that little bit of extra juice. Remarkable that the oc'd Galaxy card gives ~33% extra performance of the default 8600GT.

BIOSHOCK:

This latest game based on the Unreal 3 engine has been getting rave reviews for delivering an immersive first person shooter experience. As we don't have the full retail game yet, we used the demo to test the video cards. We skipped the first level and with the help of fraps, we logged the fps during the second level (starts when the elevator is attacked).



As we still use Windows for testing purposes, no DX10 features were enabled. The resolution was 1440x900, details highest possible. The more FPS, the better. Numbers are average.



The reference 8600GT is not capable of running the game fluently, whereas the higher clocked versions of Sparkle and Galaxy render the game good. Notice how the impact of the extra 190Mhz on the memory has little to no effect on Bioshock.

Colin McRae DIRT

The Colin McRae series has always been on the edge of technology, pushing graphics cards and CPUs to deliver astonishing graphics, the latest incarnation called DIRT takes racing games to the next level GFX wise. As this game is really hard for the 8600GT cards, we had to use lower resolutions for the first time!



We used 1024x768 along with details settings at higher and 4x multisampling. We used Fraps to log the fps in a quick crossover race in Canberra Park.



Again, the reference 8600GT has problems with rendering the game. Our overclocked Galaxy card is surprisingly good with a boost of 2fps.

Temperature and Noise Tests



As the PCB was specially designed by Galaxy to enhance the performance of the card, we were quite interested to find out if the extra juice provided by the 6-pin power connector made the card extra hot. Galaxy informed us that they managed to cut down the number of layers on the PCB in order to keep the temperature as low as possible (and reduce manufacturing costs).



As you can see, the card is indeed quite cool. No problems running at overclocked speeds, the Coolermaster copper cooling keeps the card cool. After testing the Sparkle Calibre, I was afraid that this card would turn out to be even louder. We previously found the low profile cooler on the Calibre card too loud for comfort, luckily with the Galaxy noise was not a problem. While we didn’t have a dBA meter at our disposal, so unfortunately can’t provide you with detailed numbers. Subjective opinion is quite positive of the Galaxy as we couldn’t hear it over the stock Intel heatsink of the E2160.

Extreme Overclocking

It’s not every day a manufacturers tells you to go ahead and try to voltmod the product they send you, trying to push their hardware to the limit. We’ve received a green flag to do whatever we can to extract the best performance, so we are getting ready to increase voltage to both GPU and Memory chips.


The chip on the left is for the Vgpu, the chip on the right is for the Vmem.

Note that we will have another article published under our overclocking team “OCTB” with this card under extreme cooling. The Vgpu modification is quite difficult to figure out and we're still working on the project. We have already tried to start the overclock sessions about a week ago, but without the Vgpu modification, we didn't spend too much time on overclocking the card.



Keep an eye on the front page for this overclocking article. Onto our conclusive thoughts ->

Conclusive Thoughts

Galaxy delivered quite an impressive product with the 8600GE which comes very close to the performance of the 8600 GTS card but at a lower price point.

Taking into consideration that this card is build with overclocking in mind and features an extra 6-pin power adapter (unlike other 8600 GT cards) the reference speeds of the 8600 GTS can be matched easily with a slight overclock, the Coolermaster GPU cooling makes sure the video card runs cool and quiet.

If we compile a small overview of the current asking price of the different 8600 GT models we end up with this:

Reference 8600 GT: ~€100

Calibre 8600 GT 512MB: ~€145

Galaxy 8600 GE: ~€130 (in some countries less expensive)

Reference 8600 GTS: ~€150

On average the Galaxy 8600 GE offers ~30% more performance out of the box compared to the stock 8600 GT, incidentally the price is also 30% higher, so it doesn’t offer a worse price/performance ratio, if anything, with the added overclocking potential it’s safe to say that the 8600GE is a 8600 GTS in disguise!

So is the card worth its money? Yes!

If you’re looking to upgrade your system or want to play the latest game without breaking the bank, the 8600 GE will offer you a very solid upgrade path, offering playable frame rates at med/high quality settings and resolutions.

Galaxy 8600GE Recommended for



We hope you enjoyed reading this review and stay tuned for more extreme overclocking action with this video card.