In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 are very slightly better than the Nvidia GeForce 7900 GTO.

The 8600 GT was released less than a year after the GeForce 7900 GTO, and so they are likely to have similar driver support for optimizing performance when running the latest games.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 and the GeForce 7900 GTO have the same amount of video memory, but are likely to provide slightly different experiences when displaying game textures at high resolutions.

The GeForce 7900 GTO has 19.8 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the 8600 GT, which means that the memory performance of the GeForce 7900 GTO is slightly better than the 8600 GT.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 has 32 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce 7900 GTO has 24. However, the actual shader performance of the 8600 GT is 43 and the actual shader performance of the GeForce 7900 GTO is 16. The 8600 GT having 27 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the GeForce 7900 GTO performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 requires 46 Watts to run and the GeForce 7900 GTO requires 81 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the 8600 GT and a PSU with at least 400 Watts for the GeForce 7900 GTO. The GeForce 7900 GTO requires 35 Watts more than the 8600 GT to run. The difference is significant enough that the GeForce 7900 GTO may have a slight adverse affect on your yearly electricity bills in comparison to the 8600 GT.