MSI Geforce 8600 GTS Diamond Plus
The Geforce 8600 GTS Diamond Plus (cumulative frame rate 1190.9 fps) effortlessly outpaces the Radeon HD 2600 Pro Crossfire (1033.2 fps) and even the HD 2600 XT at default (918.6 fps) and Turbo speeds (977.8 fps). MSI equips its card with 512 MB of DDR3 RAM for which it advertises an access time of only 1.0 ns on its website. The card is clocked at standard frequencies for an 8600 GTS, namely 675 MHz (GPU), 1000 MHz (memory), and 1450 MHz (shader)
The MSI card’s equipment is on the luxurious side, including an integrated HDMI output and a separate HDMI cable, as well as a component output cable for HDTV, TV-out, and S-Video. It also ships with the game Company of Heroes, which gains DirectX 10 support in Windows Vista as of patch 1.70.
The SPDIF connector found on the board is also a particularly interesting feature. The card comes with two cables, one for an internal connection to your soundcard, the other for an external one on the backplane. Sadly, this feature receives no further explanation either in the mini-manual or on the company website.
Since graphics cards usually don’t contain any sound functionality to begin with, we can only speculate that this connector is used to transmit the audio signal of a Blu-ray or HD-DVD. ATI’s Radeon HD 2x00 cards transmit this signal through their DVI ports using the DVI-HDMI adapter. MSI’s Diamond Plus does not need such an adapter, since it sports an integrated HDMI port. We plan to investigate whether the SPDIF interface really transmits the audio signal and how it does this in an upcoming test using HD DVD material.
MSI’s modified Forceware driver features an overclocking section with D.O.T. (dynamic overclocking technology), which enables a dynamic increase in clock speed of 2 to 10 percent. Aided by the heatpipes, the small and powerful fan has no problems cooling the GPU, which idles at 40°C in 2D mode and reaches 48°C under 3D load. Installing Nvidia’s official Forceware driver version 163.17, we realized that this driver does not regulate the small fan’s speed, resulting in a very high noise level of 49.4 db(A).
First ! e vai!
"The HIS card only comes with DVI connectors, which makes dual-link a sensible choice for the 1920 resolution."
Uh. No, it really doesn't.
The HDMI(1.2 and below) type A connector is equivalent to
a single-link DVI-D connector; the adaptor is purely
mechanical. Dual-link DVI is equivalent to the HDMI type
B connector, which is largely unused (although I have
hopes, because HDMI 1.3 type B can do 680MPix/s).
1920x1080p/60 fits quite nicely through the bandwidth
limit (165MHz) of an HDMI 1.2 type A connector, and
equally well through a single-link DVI connector -
as you can tell by the multitude of single-link DVI
24" 1920x1200@60Hz monitors on the market.
Dual-link DVI would give you 48bpp colour support at
1920x1080, but that's irrelevant if only a single link
is being used, via an HDMI adaptor. Also, the DVI
connector is perfectly capable of transmitting the
audio component of HDMI (the audio component uses the
same signal wires as the video), if it can be routed
to the card. Whether the content permits the audio to
be routed without HDCP is beyond my expertise.
Also, at the risk of testing my mathematical abilities:
"In Windows XP, the performance delta between the two cards in cumulative frame rate is now less than 20fps (Geforce 8800GTS 1878.9 fps, Radeon HD 2900 XT 1809.6 fps)."
That sounds like "less than 70fps" to me (not that it
makes much difference, obviously - they *are* close.)