In terms of overall gaming performance, the graphical capabilities of the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 are significantly better than the Nvidia GeForce 6800 GT Leadtek Edition.

The 8600 GT was released over a year more recently than the 6800 GT, and so the 8600 GT is likely to have better driver support, meaning it will be more optimized for running the latest games when compared to the 6800 GT.

The 8600 GT has 256 MB more video memory than the 6800 GT, so is likely to be slightly better at displaying game textures at higher resolutions. However, the overall memory performance is about the same.

The 6800 GT has 9.6 GB/sec greater memory bandwidth than the 8600 GT, which means that the memory performance of the 6800 GT is marginally better than the 8600 GT.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 has 32 Shader Processing Units and the GeForce 6800 GT Leadtek Edition has 22. However, the actual shader performance of the 8600 GT is 43 and the actual shader performance of the 6800 GT is 8. The 8600 GT having 35 better shader performance and an altogether better performance when taking into account other relevant data means that the 8600 GT delivers a marginally smoother and more efficient experience when processing graphical data than the 6800 GT.

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB GDDR3 requires 46 Watts to run but there is no entry for the GeForce 6800 GT Leadtek Edition. We would recommend a PSU with at least 350 Watts for the 8600 GT.