Half-Life, the popular PC franchise, keeps chugging along with Episode One - the latest installment of the Half-Life 2 Episodes. Episode Two is coming out in less than a week and Valve has added some nice technical features to the Source Engine.
As in the CS:S Stress Test, everything is set the same. High Detail (Model, Texture, Shader and Shadows), Water Shader at Reflect All and Color Correction Enabled. High Dynamic Range is set to Full and Vertical Sync is Disabled.
Half-Life 2 Episode One
Note that the results are from pure gameplay. Also worth mentioning is that 8x AA / 8x AF did not work with the GeForce 7600 GT. Whether I forced the settings in-game or through the driver, I kept getting the same benchmark results for 8x/8x and 16x/16x as I did for 4x/4x. I suppose it is possible that an out of memory condition was occurring due to the high level of AA being requested.
Results are with 2x and 4x AA enabled.
HL2 Episode One Performance - 2x Antialiasing
HL2 Episode One Performance - 4x Antialiasing
Half-Life 2 Episode 1 is probably the best example of how well the NX8600GT TT performs over the GeForce 7600 GT. While the frame rate of the GeForce 7600 GT dropped when jumping resolutions, the NX8600GT TT stood strong and maintained excellent frame rates. Even the boost of the Twin Turbo feature proved what the NX8600GT TT does best.
CONCLUSION
Overall, the NX8600GT Twin Turbo is an excellent GeForce 8 Series solution for those on a budget. It's a nice step up from a GeForce 7600 GT and will cost around $120-$150 retail, although no official retail price has been set at this time. It is a dual-slot design with a nice cooling solution and a very unique "Twin Turbo" feature that gives that little extra boost in frame rates. The extra BIOS can even be used as a backup should a bad flash corrupt the BIOS in use.
Personally, the graphics card has worked excellent for me and my rig. It hasn't chewed my GeForce 7600 GT and spat it out or anything, but it has certainly increased performance in all of my games and also allowed me to play at higher resolutions. Remember, that the GeForce 8600 GT is a lower-end GPU when it comes to the existing GeForce 8 Series lineup.
All of the tests were done in Windows XP Professional because Windows Vista is still not the best place to benchmark hardware. With that in mind, no DirectX 10 tests were performed. In reality, there aren't any games that have been designed with DirectX 10 from the ground up and Crysis isn't here yet. Also notice that I did not test this graphics card in SLI. The NX8600GT Twin Turbo is SLI-Ready, but I do not have another GeForce 8600 GT to pair it with, not have I seen any benchmarks with two 8600 GTs in SLI recently.
MSI NX8600GT Twin Turbo
The bottom line is that I would recommend the NX8600GT Twin Turbo to anyone who still has a video card equal to or lower than the GeForce 7600 GT and is on a small budget. Thanks to MSI for sending the video card to test and benchmark, and thanks to MikeC for giving me the opportunity to review some hardware!
Questions or comments about this review can be made in this forum thread.
