Gadgetory

yes another retro unboxing today we will be unboxing the EVGA GeForce 8600 GT s super super clocked edition 256 megabytes PCIe DirectX 10 ready with a big circle DirectX 10 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 step-up program which probably isn't valid for this card anymore I'm thinking because it's pretty old ok SLI ready full DirectX 10 support blah blah blah this is all the same stuff you saw before high dynamic range lighting Wow - dual link DVI outputs support - 2560 by 1600 resolution displays Wow what else do we got here ok lifetime warranty really comes with a lifetime warranty upon product registration lots pretty cool pretty cool for like a relatively low end card alright 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 design for extreme HD gaming not anymore it isn't but it was I hated this packaging from EVGA bethany's 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 tab here so then he could never put the stupid card back in the box if you wanted to which is a problem when you're a professional unboxer like me okay the folder contains EVGA k stickers and installation CD with trial software and an installation guide so for 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 alright so let's go ahead and throw this back in there EVD is packaging has really come a long way since then ok enemy territory quake Wars ok not super relevant game anymore look at this we got one of those components out thing bombs that could be useful not all right we've got to 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 still running VGA monitors well not maybe not most but many gamers we're still running VGA monitors even if they were buying gaming graphics cards all right so here I'm just going to put the other side this aside put this on the side and bring it over here we'll have a look at the 8600 GT s now I don't remember exactly what the difference was between the 8600 GT s and the 8600 GT but um my understanding is it's something to do with lower memory on the GTS and the 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 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 as they have maybe a secondary one here on many parts we've got a single PCIe 6 pin power connector we've got some capacitors and voltage regulation we've got a PCI Express 16 X 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 ething as to go along with the two 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 costs the same today as this one did a few years ago and I want to do what I did with the GTX 560 t I launched with the 550 ti launched 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 DirectX 11 GPU such as the 550 ti so thank you for checking out this unboxing of the 8600 GT s 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 Crysis just because it's a 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 ty and the old 88 88 8600 TTS super super claw