yes another retro unboxing today we will
be unboxing the EVGA GeForce 8600 GTS
super super clocked Edition 256 megabyte
PCIe direct X10 ready with a big circle
direct X10 ready hdcp capable back when anyone cared about that video card it is
SLI ready it is Graphics by NVIDIA and it has a free copy of enemy territory
Quake Wars inside it also includes EVGA 90-day stepup program which probably
isn't valid for this card anymore I'm thinking because it's pretty old okay
SLI ready full direct X10 support blah blah blah this is all the same stuff we
saw before high dynamic range lighting wow two dual link DVI output support two
2560 x600 resolution displays wow uh
what else do we got here okay lifetime warranty really comes with a lifetime
warranty upon product registration well that's pretty cool pretty cool for like
a relatively low-end card all right make sure these two stickers match up before
you buy this card let's open this baby up there we
are break that seal like nobody's
business designed for extreme HD
gaming not anymore it isn't but it
was I hated this packaging from EVGA back when they used to package cards
like this because it was impossible because of the the lips on the plastic
to put it back in without catching the uh the tab here so then you could never
put this stupid card back in the box if you wanted to um which is a problem when
you're a professional unboxer like me okay the folder contains evj K stickers
and installation CD with trial software and an installation guide so throw that
CD away download the latest drivers off the NVIDIA website because I can pretty
much guarantee you this is a really old driver at this point all right so let's
go ahead and throw this back in there
evga's packaging has really come a long way since then okay enemy territory
Quake Wars um okay not a super relevant
game anymore oo look at this we got one of those uh component out thingamajiggy
Bobs that could be useful not all right
we've got two Molex to single PCIe power
adapter we've got an S video out cable
that could be useful not okay then we've got two DVI to VGA adapters because back
then most people were still running VGA monitors well not maybe not most but
many gamers were still running VGA monitors even if they were buying new
gaming graphics cards all right so here I'm just going to put this aside put
this aside put this on a side and bring
it over here and we'll have a look at the 8600 GTS now I don't remember
exactly what the difference
was between the 8600 GTS and the 8600 GT
but um my understanding is it's something to do with lower memory on the GTS and a
higher clock speed or something like that and the performance was fairly
similar now there's a very good reason actually that I'm doing this particular
retro unboxing but I'm going to get to that after I have a look at the overall
layout of the card so this is from back when gaming cards could actually be
single slot so you can see here we've got just a single fan here we've got a
nice little cooler I don't know if it includes any heat pipes it looks like it
doesn't just a typical thin cooler and it actually exhausts all of the air
either out the back of the cooler here or um probably more of it comes out of
the top of it here so that's going to be maybe a bit of an issue for the card
the next one down because as I recall the 8600 did round a little on the
toasty side but shouldn't be that big of a deal especially with the ventilation
that you get in most decent gaming cases the SLI Bridge used to be located in a
fairly different location compared to what we see now where the SLI bridge is
usually right about here and there might be a secondary one here on many cards uh
we've got a single PCIe six pin power connector we've got some capacitors and
voltage regulation we've got a PCI Express 16x slot that the card runs off
of and then up here where we would typically these days see DVI DVI and
mini HDMI we now see that s video and
component output thing as to go along with the
two um dual link DVI ports on the back
of the card we find nothing really of Interest and that's pretty much it so
why did I do this unboxing the reason is
that I wanted to compare a card from a few years ago to a card that cost the
same today as this one did a few years
ago and I want to do what I did with the GTX 560 TI launch with the 550 TI launch
so I'm going to take that card from a few years ago in the similar price
bracket and I'm going to say okay let's say you own one of these or you own an
8600 GT or some other similar class of GPU what kind of an image quality
improvement what kind of a gameplay Improvement are you going to see by
upgrading to a current generation similar directx11 GPU such as the 550 TI
so thank you for checking out this unboxing of the 8600 GTS super super
clocked don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech tips for more unboxings
reviews and other videos especially if you do want to see that image quality
comparison I'll likely use crisis just because it's uh you know a pretty
demanding game I might use Metro 2033 haven't really decided yet but
definitely subscribe if you want to make sure that you catch that image quality
comparison between the 550 TI or taii
and the old 88 U 88 8600 GTS super super
claw