tech blog

With DirectX 10 games like crysis and bioshock hitting the shelves its time we upgraded to the new generation of Graphic cards.Here i am reviewing Nvidias mid-range directx10 card-Sparkle 8600gt 512mb.the card was tested on a system with the following specs;

processor: Amd athlon X2 4000+

Ram: 1gb ddr2

hard disk: segate 160gb sata

sparkle 8600gt 512mb

os: windows vista 32bit

The card came in a fairly large pearl colored box.It contained the card in an antistatic bag,a driver cd,video cables and a manual.The card costed 120$.No games came with the card.The card looked very similar to the 6600gt with not a very large cooler and it idled at 50 degrees and about 60-65 on load.I somehow felt the cooler was small so i tried placing an NVsilencer 6 and to my suprise it sat perfectly and moreover i notices a 10 degrees drop with the card running at 39 degrees idle and 48 on full load.

Crysis performance:

The first thing i did was install crysis and see how the card could handle it.By default the game set the video settings to medium specs and res:1024 x 768..The game ran perfectly with Fps about 14-22.I downloaded a tweak file from incrysis.com forums and with this i could run the game smoothly on high settings and texture resolution to medium on 1024x768 at 11fps and 1280x1024 at 9fps but the game was very much playable