In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 are significantly better than the Nvidia Quadro NVS 310 PNY Low Profile Edition.

The NVS 310 was released over three years more recently than the 8600 GT, and so the NVS 310 is likely to have far better driver support, meaning it will be much more optimized and ultimately superior to the 8600 GT when running the latest games.

The Quadro NVS 310 PNY Low Profile Edition and the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The 8600 GT has 8.4 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the NVS 310, which means that the memory performance of the 8600 GT is marginally better than the NVS 310.

The Quadro NVS 310 PNY Low Profile Edition has 48 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 has 32. However, the actual shader performance of the NVS 310 is 53 and the actual shader performance of the 8600 GT is 43. The NVS 310 having 10 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the 8600 GT performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The NVS 310 transistor size technology is 40 nm (nanometers) smaller than the 8600 GT. This means that the NVS 310 is expected to run much cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the 8600 GT.

The Quadro NVS 310 PNY Low Profile Edition requires 20 Watts to run and the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 requires 46 Watts. 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 NVS 310. The 8600 GT requires 26 Watts more than the NVS 310 to run. The difference is not significant enough for the 8600 GT to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the NVS 310.