In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 are marginally better than the Nvidia Quadro 600.

The Quadro 600 was released over three years more recently than the 8600 GT, and so the Quadro 600 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 600 has 512 MB more video memory than the 8600 GT, so is likely to be much better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. This is supported by the fact that the Quadro 600 also has superior memory performance overall.

The Quadro 600 has 3.2 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the 8600 GT, which means that the memory performance of the Quadro 600 is marginally better than the 8600 GT.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 has 32 Shader Processing Units and the Quadro 600 has 96. However, the actual shader performance of the 8600 GT is 43 and the actual shader performance of the Quadro 600 is 61. The Quadro 600 having 18 better shader performance is not particularly notable, as altogether the 8600 GT performs better when taking into account other relevant data.

The Quadro 600 transistor size technology is 40 nm (nanometers) smaller than the 8600 GT. This means that the Quadro 600 is expected to run much cooler and achieve higher clock frequencies than the 8600 GT. While they exhibit similar graphical performance, the Quadro 600 should consume less power than the 8600 GT.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 requires 46 Watts to run and the Quadro 600 requires 40 Watts. We would recommend a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the 8600 GT and a PSU with at least 300 Watts for the Quadro 600. The 8600 GT requires 6 Watts more than the Quadro 600 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 Quadro 600.