Biostar 8600 GTS 512 MB GDDR3

Biostar is the first manufacturer to release a GeForce 8600 GTS card that comes with 512 MB memory instead of 256 MB. Since fast 1.0ns GDDR3 memory is expensive (about $35 for 256 MB if you buy a ton of chips) this card is quite a bit more expensive than the 256 MB variants.

Our tests are not fully conclusive, while we see zero improvement in some benchmarks, we could also see up to 15% improvement in others. This could be a driver limitation as well, since NVIDIA may have optimized their driver to work best with 256 MB of video memory. The overall performance gain is definitely smaller than 10% - whether this is enough for you to spend $50 more is up to you. While overclocking performance of our sample was rather slim, it seems that we got an unlucky sample.

If you are looking to increase your performance easily at a later point you can pair the Biostar 8600 GTS with any other 8600 GTS and run it in SLI. If you are not afraid of overclocking and want to save some money you should take a look at Biostar’s 8600 GTS V-Ranger 256 MB which is the only card on the market that allows changing of GPU and Memory Voltage for massive overclocking.

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