When we first reviewed the GeForce 8600 GTS two months ago there were a few things that became apparent almost right away! First and foremost the 8600 GTS lacked real performance and at $200 US it was hardly cheap given what it offered. Another serious blow to the 8600 GTS was the Nvidia reference design that featured a little heatsink and fan combo that makes more noise than a light air-craft. Thankfully today we have a new ASUS version of the GeForce 8600 GTS that at least addresses this issue.
The GeForce 8600 series was finally released in April, at which time we got our first glimpse at Nvidia’s new DirectX 10 line-up. Unfortunately, there was little that impressed us about these new graphics cards, as the 8600 GT and GTS only offered a small step up in performance when compared to previous generation products. In fact, we are yet to review a new GeForce 8600 product worth buying. Between the mediocre performance and boring reference board designs, there is very little to like about the GeForce 8600 products that we have reviewed thus far.
However this could all be about to change, as ASUS has recently presented us with their Extreme N8600 GTS Silent graphics card. Yes, finally this is an all passive GeForce 8600 GTS graphics card! Of course passive cooling is not going to revive the poor performance of the 8600 GTS, but for the graphics card itself passive cooling can really do a lot. While products such as the GeForce 8600 GTS are primarily focused at gamers, they are also ideal for home theatre computers as this particular GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) has the unique ability to support PureVideo HD with VP2 (Video Processor 2), BSP, and AES128.
Features such as PureVideo HD play a vital role, as mid-range CPUs (Central Processing Units) struggle to decode high quality HD-DVD and Blu-ray content, while lower end hardware simply fails. This is where hardware assisted video decoding comes in handy and products such as this Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS GPU support it. PureVideo HD VP2 is able to off-load the entire decoding process for either HD-DVD or Blu-ray movies. This means the decoding process can be carried out by mainstream hardware so that mid-range computers are more than capable of displaying high definition content.
Previous GPUs such as those that made up the GeForce 7 series featured a 3D engine, display processor and a video processor. Now the new GeForce 8500/8600 GPUs feature a 3D engine, display processor, video processor (VP2) and a bitstream processor (BSP). When decoding the most taxing task is decoding the entropy encoded bitstream. Entropy encoding is a data compression scheme that assigns codes to symbols so as to match code lengths with the probabilities of the symbols. Typically, entropy encoders are used to compress data by replacing symbols represented by equal-length codes. The Nvidia bitstream processor (BSP) takes care of this demanding task.
Finally the GeForce 8500/8600 GPU also features what is called the AES128 engine, which is designed to decrypt the data sent from the CPU, which of course helps to limit processor utilization. These are very new features that can only be found in the G84 and G86 GPUs, which are of course used by the GeForce 8500 GT, GeForce 8600 GT and GTS. This means that the GeForce 8800 series does not include these new features. Therefore watching Blu-ray or HD-DVD movies will work best on a GeForce 8500/8600 series graphics card.
