8600GS just full of disappointments?

Recently with the Asus F3SV getting around 2000 3dmark06 points I was beginning to feel worried that the 8600GS might be even weaker than last generation's midrange. Now, looking at the upcoming LG R500 which features a 8600GS at 256mb... these benchmarks don't seem too comforting:
http://xnote.tistory.com/2
do you think that 1) they made a mistake when benchmarking or 2) they benchmarked at some ridiculous resolution or 3) the 8600GS in that system is just so vastly underpowered?

 

Should be more powerful than that. I doubt that they have the latest driver thus making it so weak. The gs should come in at about 2400~2800+...

I believe the GS is those defected GTs during manufacturing...

I tried the keyboard of the R500, din quite like the feeling of it compared to the S1

 

You were able to see one of those in person? Did you have a chance to look at the clocks of the video card?

 

Nope.. As it is in Saturn Mannheim, and it is log in as Guest, i cant do anything much about it. Maybe wave could do something about it...

I ll go again later, and see what i can get...

 

Opps...sorry, the model there was the E500, not the R500.

 

I dont think the 8600 gs is related to the 8600 gt.

I think its really marketing wording trying to sell the top low range card to the mid range market.

There arent enough 8600 gts to go around atm.

I dont think a lot of the consumers buying a new laptop with the 8600 gs are going to be that happy with it long term personally.

 

Yeah, the 8600M GS performance is pretty disappointing, from what I've read here it is pretty much the equivalent of a 7600Go, only with DX10 support.

For true next gen performance, better to stick with the 8600M GT version or wait for the 8800M cards to come out.

Drivers are still immature, though, so maybe things will be different in a couple of months.

 

I don't feel too hopeful on that ... in the past there haven't been many cases where "new drivers" would be able to drammatically increase the performance of cards ...

 

Agreed. Especially considering the rather abysmal driver support of the GeForce 7 series in Vista. I guess time will tell...........

 

With current drivers the 8600M GS benches about 50% higher in 3DMark06 than its Go 7600 predecessor. Both the Go 7600 and the 8600M GS have 128-bit memory buses, so the 8600M GS will also be significantly faster in real-world gaming.

 

The 8600GS got 1600-1700 3dmark06 points in the above benchmark ... that's a lot lower than the last 7700

 

Geforce 8600M GS - 3DMark06: 2,743
Geforce Go 7600 - 3DMark06: 1,900

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html

 

^^...OK, but just the 8600M GS is a mere 40 pts over the current gen Go7700 in that bench, 2700 vs. 2743 3dMark 06. Go7700 is better than Go7600, but not significant enough to generate a massive difference in real-world performance between the two.

I'm still not convinced the 8600M GS is enough of a generational leap to warrant the purchase.

 

But the F3SV got 2032 points and the LG R500 got 1670 or something.

 

Both the 8600GS and 8600 GT are based on the same core- The G84. The difference is in the no of pipelines- 16 vs 32. Of course, it means that they are the defective, QC failed cores. Still, I am going to get a F3Sv anyway. I believe at least 8 of the remaining 16 pipelines should be good, so I am gonna try unlocking them. Logically, with the current products, any G84 that has even 1 pipeline bad, cannot be released as a GT, so is released as a GS. That is unless nvidia has released the totally defective chips as the GS, and is planning to release a product between the GS and GT, with, say, 24 pipelines.

 

How do you unlock pipelines?

 

Softmodding the card. Changing the BIOS. Use Software like RivaTuner. Not all cards can be unlocked, though.

 

That's @ 1024x768. Ken (GenTechPC) benchmarked it HERE, where it got 2032 @ 1280x1024 (the standard 3DMark06 resolution). And HERE is the score for 1024x768. However, OC'd It reached 2879 (still lower than the go7700 OC'D), so it overclocks better than the go7700. Stop using the wrong numbers.

 

I have a samsung r70 with a 8600M GS and a ran a few benchmarks. I got a 2782 on 3dmark06 with a resolution of 1280x800 (my native res) I dunno if adding 224 pixels to the bottom would decrease my score by 800.. maybe it will. But in real world gaming, I can run guild wars on high at 50-60 FPS. Fear on high cpu high gpu at an average of 50 fps, 30 being the low and 95 being the high. CS:S will everything maxed will give me and avg of 114 fps. This was only with 1 gig of ram, I just upgraded to two, I dunno how much it would raise it, probably little to none. So I think it's very capable for this generation of games and I don't know about the future because the future hasn't come yet. One thing that worries me though is that the card runs VERY hot. 60C on idle 80-83C on load....

 

Oh, My bad. Cool that your R70 seems to better than Asus F3Sv. Seems to be quite disseperate results around the 8600M GS.

 

I believe the clocks are responsible. The 8600GS is usually clocked very high, to offset the lower no of pipelines. minx, could you tell us your stock clocks(core/mem)?

 

This link that someone just showed me just made me feel a fair bit better:
http://www.ebuzz.co.kr/content/buzz_view.html?m_id=0301&cat_id=020&uid=24204&page=1
I wonder what resolutions those are tested under? Can't be lower than 1024x768. Probably 1280x800 then? Does 3dmark generally default to the same aspect ratio as the screen? Ie. run at standard if the screen's of standard aspect ratio and wide screen if the screen's of wide screen aspect ratio?

 

I am still waiting for the R500 to arrive at notebook.de store. It is still listed 1-2 weeks. It has been like that for 3 weeks now. Everybody is having big problems with the availability of SR notebooks. Considering it was lunched a month ago....

 

Do you think those store owners would run benchmarks on those systems before we buy them if we went to their real life store?

 

Do you guys know the power consumption difference between the gt and gs versions? Will the gt make the battery life considerably lower? How are they compared to the 7000 series?

 

Don't know. Somehow they managed to deplete the 5200mAh 6cell battery in the above test in an hour and a half, and I am hoping that's with like wifi, DVD etc all on and on performance setting, because 1.5 hours of battery life's kinda absurd. Besides, this 6cell battery is fairly high capacity for 6 cell unless i'm mistaken (for example, the 6cell in the Asus A8 series is 4800mAh).

 

500 core /700 memory is how mine is clocked. I'm afraid to overclock it because it's already @ 83 degrees C while gaming. My friend recently got the asus and his is clocked 500core 400 memory!(not a typo, four hundred!) the funny thing is that his card IDLES @ 77 C! He has not tested gaming yet. In terms of battery life, I can get about three hours on this laptop just doing standard laptoping on silent mode. (no cpu/gpu intensive programs) which I think is pretty good. I have a 6 cell battery btw.

 

Hmm.. and the Nvidia site gives out 600/1200/700 (Core/Shader/Mem). Memory clocks should be identical across the board, though. I guess your friend was on power saving mode. You do have a bit of leeway in core. What's your default 3DMark'06? And any in game FPS, if you have tested....

 

If you check my other post, I have posted the 3dmark06 scores + in game fps.. The link is... http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=128401&highlight=r70 last post. Since then I have reformatted my computer and installed another gig of ram, we'll see how that goes.

 

8600GS actually doing pretty good with 3GB of RAM, it performs better than 8600GT with 2GB of RAM:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=125246&page=38

 

Great post ken. I wonder why 2gb-->3gb affects the frame rate so much? I thought 2 gb was more than sufficient for windows vista and games...

 

Well, though I really think that the drivers have a lot to do with performance at the moment, I think the impact of RAM on the frame-rate also is affected greatly by the game too.

 

Yeah, some games are more memory intensive than others (mainly FPS). Others tend to be more processor oriented (mainly RTS).

 

Vista takes much much more memory than XP, right? So what if I used XP instead of Vista? Are there 8600GS drivers for XP available?

 

Would the 8600GT DDR2 benefit from 3GB of RAM in XP?

Will it still run dual-channel even though they're different size memory modules?

If the performance increase is that significant, it may be worth my while to plug in a 2GB module.