ASUS is first manufacturer to launch graphics cards based on NVIDIA’s new graphics circuits for the mid-range segment; ASUS EN8600 GTS. ASUS describes the card as a high-end card, which we’re not sure if we quite agree with, but it gets even more interesting now that we access to some official and detailed specifications; the GPU is clocked at 675MHz and the memories at 2GHz (GDDR3). The memory has to work via a 128-bit bus, but as we’ve reported earlier this doesn’t seem to affect the card significantly. This is the first card to bring DirectX and Shader Model 4.0 to the lower price segments and we’ve managed to localize it in stores for about €210, not in stock though. The card sports dual DVI outputs and HDCP support.
Our French affiliate site VTR-Hardware has published a detailed review of GeForce 8600 where they compare it to a Radeon X1950GT. The cards perform quite similar, but the 8600 card seems to handle antialiasing and anisotropic filtering better.
