In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the 8600 GT and the 8600 GT are equal.

The 8600 GT and the 8600 GT have both the same core clock speed and the same Texture Fill Rate. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The 8600 GT and the 8600 GT have both the same core clock speed and the same Pixel Fill Rate. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The 8600 GT was released less than a year after the 8600 GT, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The 8600 GT has 256 MB more video memory than the 8600 GT, so is likely to be slightly better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the 8600 GT also has superior memory performance overall.

The 8600 GT has 9.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the 8600 GT, which means that the memory performance of the 8600 GT is marginally better than the 8600 GT.

Both the GeForce 8600 GT Inno3D 256MB GDDR2 and the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 have 32 Shader Processing Units. Having the same number of SPUs and using the same architecture means that the performance they offer can be compared by looking at the memory bandwidth, Texture and Pixel Rates. In this case, although the GPUs are very similar in performance, the 8600 GT takes the edge.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 requires 46 Watts to run but there is no entry for the 8600 GT. We would recommend a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the 8600 GT, but we do not have a recommended PSU wattage for the 8600 GT.