In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 are significantly better than the Intel HD i7 2700K.

The HD i7 2700K has a 310 MHz higher core clock speed than the 8600 GT, but the 8600 GT has 14 more Texture Mapping Units than the HD i7 2700K. As a result, the 8600 GT exhibits a 6.9 GTexel/s better Texture Fill Rate than the HD i7 2700K. This still holds weight but shader performance is generally more relevant, particularly since both of these GPUs support at least DirectX 10.

The HD i7 2700K has a 310 MHz higher core clock speed than the 8600 GT, but the 8600 GT has 6 more Render Output Units than the HD i7 2700K. As a result, the 8600 GT exhibits a 2.6 GPixel/s better Pixel Fill Rate than the HD i7 2700K. However, both GPUs support DirectX 9 or above, and pixeling performance is only really relevant when comparing older cards.

The HD i7 2700K was released over three years more recently than the 8600 GT, and so the HD i7 2700K 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 8600 GT has 512 MB video memory, but the HD i7 2700K does not have an entry, so the two GPUs cannot be reliably compared in this area.

The HD i7 2700K has 12 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 has 32. However, the actual shader performance of the HD i7 2700K is 65 and the actual shader performance of the 8600 GT is 43. The HD i7 2700K having 22 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the 8600 GT performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The HD i7 2700K transistor size technology is 48 nm (nanometers) smaller than the 8600 GT. This means that the HD i7 2700K is expected to run much cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the 8600 GT.

The HD i7 2700K requires 95 Watts to run and the GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 requires 46 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 300 Watts for the HD i7 2700K and a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the 8600 GT. The HD i7 2700K requires 49 Watts more than the 8600 GT to run. The difference is significant enough that the HD i7 2700K may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the 8600 GT.