Overclocking Results:

stock overclocked gpu (core) speed: 675 mhz 763 mhz memory speed: 2016 mhz 2242 mhz if you're new to Overclocking and not sure what to do, check out these two excellent Guides for some pointers: Overclocking the CPU and Memory Overclocking the Videocard

So far most of the GeForce 8600GTS videocards PCSTATS has gotten into the labs have been pretty good overclockers. Let's see what this Foxconn model can do for us, eh! The Foxconn 8600GTS-256 has its core and memory speed clocked at 675 MHz and 2016 MHz respectively. PCSTATS will be using nVIDIA's nTune software to overclock this time around, and we'll be increasing the core speed in ~7 MHz increments.

Let slip the dogs of war and let the overclocking begin! From a starting point of 675 MHz we're aiming to get at least 800 MHz out of the core. The GeForce 8600GTS easily cracked 700 MHz, 750MHz and 775MHz before settling on 780 MHz. It was right about then that the driver started to complain about failing its test. nTune is so picky. Unfortunately Foxconn's 8600GTS-256 really couldn't handle this speed whilst running benchmarks, so we were forced to drop the speed down to 763 MHz to keep it stable.

Next up was the 256MB of GDDR3 memory, starting at 2016 MHz it will be overclocked in ~15 MHz steps. Considering the fact that the GeForce 8600GTS memory controller is only 128 bits wide, overclocking the memory will most likely improve performance more than increasing the core clock speed.

Much to our surprise, the memory easily sailed through 2100 MHz and 2200 MHz. It stopped dead in its tracks at 2242 MHz, which is pretty darn good. The GeForce 8600GTS core and GDDR3 memory on this Foxconn videocard had no problems running at their respective maximum clock speeds.

Prelude to Benchmarks

The details of how the Foxconn 8600GTS-256 test system was configured for benchmarking; the specific hardware, software drivers, operating system and benchmark versions are indicated below. In the second column are the general specs for the reference platforms this nVIDIA GeForce 8600GTS 256MB based videocard is to be compared against. Please take a moment to look over PCSTATS test system configurations before moving on to the individual benchmark results on the next page.

PCSTATS Test System Configurations

test system reference system processor: amd Athlon64 FX-62 Clock Speed: 14 x 200 MHz = 2.8 GHz Motherboards: Asus M2-CROSSHAIR (NF 590 SLI) Videocard: Foxconn 8600GTS-256 Asus EAX1900XTX/2DHTV/512M/A Asus EAX1950PRO/HTDP/256M/A MSI NX8800GTX-T2D768E-HD MSI NX8600GTS-T2D256E-OC MSI NX7950GX2-T2D1GE Foxconn FV-N88SMCD2-ONOC MSI NX8800GTS-T2D320E-HD-OC MSI NX7900GTX-T2D512E Gigabyte GV-NX76GT256D-RH Biostar Sigma-Gate GeForce 7600GS Memory: Corsair Twin2X2048-6400C3 Hard Drive: 74GB Western Digital Raptor WD740 CDROM: AOpen Combo 52x Power Supply: PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 510 SLI Heatsink: Athlon64 FX-62 Reference Heatsink Software Setup: Microsoft WindowsXP SP2 nVIDIA Forceware 6.70 nVIDIA Forceware 91.27 ATI Catalyst 7.2 Benchmarks: 3DMark05 3DMark06 FarCry Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory Doom 3 Quake 4 FEAR AA+AF Benchmarks FarCry FEAR Doom 3