Introduction

Today we continue our coverage of mid-range video card products with a test of the latest offering from Club 3D. A passively cooled 8600 GT with 512Mb DDR2 memory. In our previous test of the 8600 GT series we did here we found that the 8600 GT offers an excellent price/performance balance and is capable of handling the latest games at reduced resolution/detail without much issue.

The 8600 GT card can be had in all kind of flavors these days with manufacturers going the extra mile to make their offer stand apart; the Club 3D sample we received is fitted with a large heatsink and has no fan installed, its primary market is the HTPC user who wants to add more GPU power to his system, with DX10 compatibility, without adding noise.

Club 3D equipped their card with DDR2 chips for a total of 512Mb, while the GPU clock speeds and shader clock remain identical to the reference specifications. The average price for this passively cooled PCI Express video card is ~€110 in shops, which is only a fraction more as the reference card.

For our comparison today we included a XFX 7600 GT 256Mb GDDR3 video card and a Sparkle Geforce 8600 GT 256Mb GDDR3 available in stores for ~€99 which is based on the reference 8600 GT design.

From left to right: Sparkle 8600 GT , Club 3D 8600 GT, XFX 7600 GT



Let’s compare specifications:

	Sparkle 8600 GT	Club 3D 8600GT	XFX 7600GT	Original 7600GT
Productionprocess	80	80	80	90
Core clock	540 MHz	540 MHz	650 MHz	560 MHz
Shader clock	1180 MHz	1188 MHz	-	-
Memory clock	DDR3 1400 MHz	DDR2 1000 MHz	DDR3 1600 MHz	DDR3 1400 MHz
Amount of memory	256	512	256	256
Memory bus width	128	128	128	128

The “new” 7600 GT at 80nm enjoys a 16% boost in GPU clocks and 14% memory speed, the Club 3D runs at reference clock speeds but has 512Mb DDR2 memory.

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

In the Box

For more than a year now Club 3D is shipping their cards in compact box, only slightly larger than the card inside; no overly crowded front either, only useful information for the end user to see what’s inside. The back is more traditional, listing all the NVIDIA features and showing a photo of the video card.



Inside you’ll find the bare essentials, a driver CD, a DVI->VGA converter, a quick installation guide and short HDTV Video Out cable.



The Club 3D 8600 GT PCB is custom design, differing from the ones we’ve seen in the past from Sparkle, Calibre and Galaxy. The heatsink is larger than the PCB and makes this card a dual slot product.



Here you can clearly see the heatsink surpassing the length of the video card, do note though that the custom PCB design is shorter than the NVIDIA reference one. Also note the lack of memory chips on the back, the 512Mb is all on the front side.



The heat is removed from the GPU by 2 heat pipes which dissipate it through the large collection of aluminum fins. The heatsink resembles the Arctic Cooling Accelero S2 quite a bit, a custom design job from AC for Club 3D so a we've been told. The latest revision of the card removes any doubt as you see in the photo here.



Club 3D added on D-Sub VGA connector, DVI connector and TV-Out to the rear of the card, giving you the option on how to connect the 8600 GT to your display of preference.



Onto the testing ->

Test Setup

Our test system is based on an Intel Core 2 Duo with Intel 975x “bad axe” motherboard, 2Gb of system memory, a fast Western Digital Raptor hard drive and fresh install of Windows XP SP2. While Windows Vista has been released earlier this year, and it has DX10, we’re waiting for games to actually make good use of the new DX10 features to make it worth switching operation system, as well as SP1 to work out the kinks in the system. With OEM’s asking Microsoft to keep XP around a bit longer it seems we’re not the only ones finding a lack of reasons to “upgrade” to a new OS. Our tests were done with the latest NVIDIA Forceware drivers available at the time of writing: 163.71.

Our previous performance comparison with the 8600 GT and 7600 GT were done with older drivers, as an extra did we did a quick benchmark session comparing the 94.24 (for 7600 GT) and 158.22 (for 8600 GT) to the new driver in Futuremark 3DMarks:






As you can see, there is not much of a difference between the two driver versions.

Back to the test setup: the enclosure used for our test is a Coolermaster CM 690.

Intel Test Setup
CPU	Intel Core 2 E6400 @ 2.8Ghz (from CSMSA)
Cooling	Coolermaster Hyper TX
Mainboard	Intel 975X Bad Axe (Modded by Piotke)
Memory	2 * 1Gb PC6400 OCZ
Other	Sunbeamtech 3D Storm Antec TruePower Trio! 650W Western Digital 74Gb Raptor SATA HDD

Test Methodology

Resolutions of 1024x768 and 1280x1024 proved quite do-able with the 8600 GT, and in some games we even got to enable Anti Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering. When comparing performance to the 7600 GT we found that the AF setting of 4x did make a noticeable impact in average FPS, the same setting enabled on the 8600 GT cards did not cause a performance drop, in fact you can safely enable 4xAF on the Geforce 8600 GT without a performance hit, a nice bonus don’t you think?

We threw together a mix/match of game benchmarks to stress the video cards, in older games as well as most recent ones, here’s our list:

Team Fortress 2

TES: Oblivion

Colin McRae DIRT

Rainbow Six Las Vegas

Prey

FEAR

STALKER

Quake Wars

Supreme Commander

BioShock

Call of Duty 4 (demo)

Unreal Tournament 3 (demo)

Before we tackle the gaming benchmarks, we start of with the synthetic benchmarks from Futuremark ->

Futuremark 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 most taxing 3DMark of them all, 3DMark06. Default settings are 1280x1024 resolution Anisotropic Filtering enabled, in short: all but the highest end VGA cards can run this benchmark fluently.



This benchmark makes heavy uses of Shader for graphical effects; the 8600 GT cards with their dedicated Shaders really excel here, the older 7600 GT units trail behind. The higher clocked DDR3 memory on the Sparkle card puts in front of the Club 3D which has 512Mb DDR2 onboard but clocked lower at 500Mhz .

Onto the 3DMark05 benchmark which also features a lot Shader heavy sessions, but runs at a lower resolution of 1024x768 with AA/AF and no HDR effects.



The 3D05 benchmark has the Club 3D in front, repeating the benchmark did not change the result, the extra memory on the card has a positive effect here.

Next up is the 3DMark03 benchmark, no more heavy Shader action here, time for the 7600 GT to shine?



The 7600 GT is able to best both other cards here with a nice margin, the Club 3D trails the Sparkle by a few %.

Last one is the now very old 3DMark2001SE DX8.1 benchmark:



The Sparkle and XFX are tied here, with the Club 3D not far behind; let’s if this situation changes when we run through our game tests ->

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, to read the full back story of this game development cycle check Wikipedia here. The gameplay of the Prey is quite innovative in the way you move around the game world, you can change gravity direction, having you walking on the walls and ceiling, or go into “ghost” mode and see the world in a “spooky” way, as shown in the screenshot below:



We used the HardwareOC Prey benchmark utility to record the average frames rates of several timedemo loops, the recorded gameplay clip has all the actions described above, jumping, shooting and running through small hallways. First up 1024x768 High Quality setting:



At only 2xAA/4xAF setting the 7600 GT has an impressive lead over the 8600 GT cards, upping the AA level to 4xAA brings the cards closer together. The Club 3D is trailing here with the lower clocked memory, the extra 256Mb does not come into play here.



Pretty much the same results at 1280x1024. The last Prey bench:



The Club 3D is as good as on par with the Sparkle, but the average FPS is noticeably lower than the 7600 GT which does well in this benchmark.

Team Fortress 2

Team Fortress 2 has been in development for more than 10 years, and now it’s finally upon us, and what a game it has become. The art direction Valve took for this game truly sets this game apart from the rest of the FPS shooters. Not only does this game look good at high resolution with every in-game detail set to maximum, at lower resolution and IQ settings it remains pleasant to look at.

We tested Team Fortress 2 by using the build-in “timedemo” function to play back a recorded demo session and used the average FPS results.



Our first test is with reduced in-game detail, HDR was disabled, as well as Motion Blur, these are the average FPS obtained at 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 during a 15min gameplay session:



At this detail setting the game remains playable on all cards even at 1600x1200, the 8600 GT have the lead, the Club 3D only trailing the Sparkle by a fraction.



If we set every game detail to High (except for Motion Blur) and enable HDR we can see performance impact on all cards, at 1600x1200 the game is still playable with an occasional dip in frame rate, at 1280x1024 the 7600 GT falls behind both 8600 GT cards. The extra 256Mb on the Club 3D card has no (positive) effect in this Source engine game.

TES: Oblivion

We start of with an RPG game, The Elder Scrolls : Oblivion has quite a taxing graphics engine, to be able to run it at high resolution and detail levels you need a high end card. Turning down the Quality settings to medium leaving HDR enabled, we started testing these mid range video cards. 4xAF was enabled and resolutions 1024x768 & 1280x1024 tested.



A manual walkthrough outside was repeated several times and the results averaged. Minimum FPS are included in the charts as these will give you an idea if you’ll see noticeable FPS drops in game or not.



Oblivion remains quite playable at 1280x1024 with medium quality settings and HDR enabled with the 8600 GT cards, the Club 3D has a lower average FPS, but is on par with the Sparkle in the min. FPS department; which is still well above 30fps.

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. It’s stressful enough to bring high end cards to a grinding halt; we had to drop resolution and in-game detail in order to get playable frame rates. Surprisingly the game remains quite enjoyable even at these low IQ settings.



We could run at the game at medium detail but had to restrict the maximum resolution to 1024x768




This new game engine makes heavy use of shaders for different GFX effects and it shows, the 7600 GT is unable to keep up with the 8600 GT cards. The Club 3D is again slightly trailing the DDR3 8600 GT card.

Rainbow Six Vegas

This First Person tactical shooter is based on the new Unreal 3 game engine, it looks splendid and takes a very high end video card if you want to run it at high resolutions. It makes heavy use of shaders and excels in delivering close very realistic Las Vegas setting, with a series of Casinos on the strip that you need to “clean”. The Unreal 3 engine pushes GFX effects to the next level but requires a hefty VGA card to deliver playable frame rates at higher detail and resolution.



Our run-through is at 1024x768 with medium detail and HDR enabled; do note the large difference between average and minimum FPS:



Our first game benchmark where the extra memory on the Club 3D shows a positive effect, the lead over the Sparkle is small, but there. The 7600 GT is behind in avg FPS, but with more dips in frame rate to a low 20 FPS.

Supreme Commander

Supreme Commander is the spiritual successor of the much lauded Total Annihilation Real-Time-Strategy game. SupCom increases the battlefield’s size, the number of units and sports a very high detailed graphics engine. The game supports dual cores (and quad cores!) out of the box, to help path finding for the thousands of units which move across the battlefield. The game engine can be taxing for graphics cards if you at very high resolutions with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled as well as the dual screen mode. When you keep things more modest you can get playable FPS on lower end VGA cards.



We enabled FRAPS to log average frame rate and ran the in-game SupCom benchmark which goes through a series of RTS actions, watching the battles from close up as well as far away. In the chart below you can see the “SupCom” score in the 10000+ region, the average FPS is on the left side in the 10~20FPS region.

At 1600x1200 we could enable high quality and get playable FPS on the 8600 GT cards, a SupCom score of ~14000 translated into fluent gameplay.


The results of both 8600 GT is very close to one another, impossible to notice in-game. The 7600 GT trails by a few FPS.

F.E.A.R.

F.E.A.R. is not a new title anymore, time flies by, released back in October 2005 this game 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. FEAR is one of the game benchmarks we ran after all the others were finished. We reinstalled the Sparkle 8600 GT and compared it head to head with the XFX 7600 GT, both at stock speeds (do note that the XFX 7600 GT has higher clock speed compared to the original 7600 GT 650Mhz GPU instead of 560Mhz).



We used the build-in benchmark of FEAR, which does an automatic runthrough showing a fire fight, water effects and explosion. First up 1280x1024 no AA but 4xAF enabled:



FEAR is fluently playable at this setting on all cards, between the XFX and Sparkle there is almost no difference, the Club 3D trails noticeably.



At 1600x1200 the difference between all cards has been noticeably reduced, the Club 3D is no almost on par with the other cards.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. an open ended FPS shooter game with high resolution textures and open environment, dynamic day/night cycles and smart AI enemies.



We ran through a night scene where Stalker come crossing through the grass with their spotlights, casting shadows in all directions, this was a very stressful scene which stressed the GPU quite a bit. In-game resolution set at 1280x1024 (0xAA) with medium detail:



No difference between the 8600 GT cards here, the 7600 GT is trailing noticeably, with dips in fps to 20FPS, where the 8600 GT cards are closer to 30.

BioShock

This latest game based on the Unreal 3 engine has been getting rave reviews for delivering an immersive first person shooter experience. You crash land with your plane near and underwater city and explore the depths of it for coming 20 or so gameplay hours. The art style and details really make this “shooter” stand out from the rest, and with a gripping story will have you playing it for hours on end.



The first 5 min of gameplay were logged and the average and minimum FPS included in the charts below, the in-game detail was set to High. AA/AF were both disabled.



At 1024x768 the Sparkle takes a nice lead over the other cards; the Club 3D is tied with the 7600 GT.



Further increasing the resolution doesn’t change the outcome by a lot, the situation between the cards remain the same, with average FPS for all cards close to unplayable.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

The team based FPS game is build on an adapted Doom 3 engine, with mega texture support to offer fluent seamless high detail textures throughout the game world. It’s a fast paced action game with many outdoor areas, vehicles to quickly go from one spot to the other, with two distinctive sides and different classes to play.



We played through a session at 1280x1024 and noted average/min FPS;



As with previous ID software based games, the engine caps the FPS in this game, while vsync was disabled, the maximum FPS here was capped to 30; all cards were able to provide fluent gameplay here, only by looking at the min FPS we can see a difference, the Sparkle is again in the lead, followed by the Club 3D and XFX.

Call of Duty 4

Call of Duty 4 is back on PC, the last installment was COD2 which was WW2 orientated, COD4 takes us to the near future where we now have the fight our way through cities and duck from enemy snipers, charge encampments in the middle of the night with green tinted goggles strapped on our heads. As with the previous games, COD4 is a fast paced game with an arcade approach the FPS shooter genre. Respawning enemies and unlimited “health” are just some of the features which make this game less than realistic, but not less entertaining.

The game engine can be quite taxing once you crank everything up to maximum settings, but the end result is worth it, with realistic smoke effects and large scale battles.



We played through the first 10 minutes of the single player demo (which is unfortunately pretty much the life span of this demo) and noted min/avg FPS.



At 1024x768 and Medium quality the new game is very playable on these mid-range video cards, both 8600 GT cards surpass the 7600 GT, the Sparkle is in the lead.



Increasing the resolution and quality settings has a disastrous effect on the performance of the 7600 GT, with average not reaching 30 FPS, the 8600 GT handle the increased GFX load better, offering average FPS around 40 with dips to 20.

Unreal Tournament 3

After the original Unreal Tournament 99, the successors 2003 and 2004 they are now back to a smaller number, Unreal Tournament 3 or UT3 for short is based on… the Unreal 3 engine and sports high resolutions textures, models, maps, driving a fast paced Death Match orientated game, with vehicle based CTF and other gameplay modes.



Surprisingly, as with Call of Duty 4, this brand new game proved not that taxing for mid-range hardware, even with high quality settings UT3 was quite playable at higher resolutions. We tested at 1280x1024 (no AA/AF) and played through a Death Match session on the demo’s Heat Ray DM map.



The Unreal 3 engine works noticeably better on 8 series NV hardware as the 8600 GT cards have a comfortable lead over the 7600 GT. The Club 3D is trailing the Sparkle slightly here.

Next we loaded up the Suspense CTF map which features a bunch of cars and hovercrafts to help you capture the enemy flag.



The Suspense map is larger and slightly more stressful on these cards, the ranking doesn’t change however.

Onto noise, power usage and temperature tests ->

Temperature & noise

Mid range cards are normally based of the high end counterparts, with features cut and less transistors, thus resulting in cooler operating temperatures, this allows for passive cooling on some models. The cards tested today however all feature active cooling, single slot heatsinks with small fan embed inside, the fan is controlled by the driver, and speeds up/slows down as the GPU temperature changes. We test the load temps in a closed case (Coolermaster CM 690 with 1x120mm front and 1x120mm in rear), ambient temperature was 25°C, noise was measured at 50cm from the side of the case, ambient noise of 37.8dBA.



Real-time HDR was run for 30 minutes and maximum temperatures recorded at the video card stock speeds.



The passively cooled 8600 GT is the hottest, as expected, but at only 76°C it’s far from critical temperatures, just make sure you have some active case cooling present inside your case.

So the heatsinks do their job at keeping the GPU cool, even when overclocked, but how noisy are they? The dBA level at boot-up was recorded, when the fan is running at full speed, afterwards Real-Time HDR was used to stress the VGA card and after 30minutes the maximum dBA was written down and compiled in this chart:



Here’s where the Club 3D card really shines, without any active cooling on the card this card will not add ANY noise to your system, how noisy your system is depends on the other components in your PC. The Club 3D makes no noise. 0dBA.

Power consumption

With 1600W power supplies touted as the next best thing, it’s essential to know how much a system really needs, before you go spending your savings on a new PSU.



We measured maximum overall system load during 3DMark03 runs (where we found power usage to spike the highest in the Nature scene).



Overall these cards are quite power usage friendly, even at full load the system doesn’t use up more than 200W, and that’s measured at the wall outlet! The DDR2 chips on the Club 3D consume slightly more than the DDR3 chips on the Sparkle, but nothing to worry about.

Time to wrap things up ->

Overclocking

We consciously did not include overclocking results in this review as the sample variance and cooling used to obtain results differs a lot. Since the Club 3D 8600 GT features passive cooling when you want to overclock it’s advised to add a fan to the heatsink, which will have a very positive effect on the temperature (looking at the large surface area of the aluminum fins). While the 8600 GT GPU has proven itself nicely in the past, scaling 10-20% without added voltage, the bottleneck on the Club 3D is actually the memory, the DDR2 chips at 500Mhz won’t go much higher, and the reduced memory bandwidth (compared to DDR3) is limiting the card’s performance. Overclocking the GPU will have less impact than hoped, compared to a DDR3 powered card.

Conclusive Thoughts

The Club 3D’s 8600 GT proved itself as a capable mid-range gaming card in our game benchmarks, although we question their choice for putting 512Mb DDR2 on there instead of 256Mb DDR3, while the performance difference between them is minimal, it’s there. The 512Mb on the card only showed its usefulness in one or two occasions.

The real selling point of the Club 3D 8600 GT however is not the amount of memory or the custom design PCB, but their choice of heatsink, the unit is completely passively cooled and this scores very high in our book as most reference cards come with noisy cooling solutions. While there are after marker products which let you obtain the same end result, Club 3D’s card comes preinstalled with one, at reduced cost with no risk of losing your warranty.

Price wise the Club 3D card scores well, available for ~€110 in online stores it’s cheaper than buying a reference Geforce 8600 GT card and installing a passive cooling yourself.

With its HDTV out capabilities and no-noise cooling this 8600 GT from Club 3D will certainly make the short-list if you’re in the market for a HTPC friendly product which doesn’t cost too much and still allows you to run the occasional game, be it a new one released this year or last year.

We thank Chistian from Club 3D for allowing to test their latest product, until next time!