In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia Quadro FX 1800 are marginally better than the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3.

The Quadro FX 1800 was released over three years more recently than the 8600 GT, and so the Quadro FX 1800 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 FX 1800 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 Quadro FX 1800 also has superior memory performance overall.

The Quadro FX 1800 has 16 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the 8600 GT, which means that the memory performance of the Quadro FX 1800 is slightly better than the 8600 GT.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 has 32 Shader Processing Units and the Quadro FX 1800 has 64. However, the actual shader performance of the 8600 GT is 43 and the actual shader performance of the Quadro FX 1800 is 35. The 8600 GT having 8 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the Quadro FX 1800 performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 requires 46 Watts to run and the Quadro FX 1800 requires 59 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the 8600 GT and a PSU with at least 450 Watts for the Quadro FX 1800. The Quadro FX 1800 requires 13 Watts more than the 8600 GT to run. The difference is not significant enough for the Quadro FX 1800 to have a noticeably larger impact on your yearly electricity bills than the 8600 GT.