8600 GT graphis card for $81

Just thought I'd let people here know I found what appears to me to be a heckuva deal. At my local Best Buy I found a BFG nVidia 8600 GT OC (mildly overclocked) with 512 megs of onboard DDR3 RAM for $80.99. That's the checkout price, not an "after you get the rebate" price. (There isn't any rebate, by the way.)

This card has a limited lifetime warranty (if you read the fineprint I think the warranty is actually "only" 99 years). The package includes the card, attached ThermalIntelligence cooler, quick install guide, 2 DVI to VGA adapters, HDTV adapter, and the driver CD with nVidia Forceware unified drivers and a pdf installation manual. Out of box core clock is 565 MHz, memory data rate is 1400 MHz, and memory bandwidth is 22.4 GB/second. This card supports both DX 9 and DX 10.

I know there are certainly more powerful graphics cards out there, but in terms of "bang for the buck" I think this is an outstanding deal.

Hope to get it installed and do some off-the-cuff testing by tomorrow and will post that info compared to my older but still rather good ATI card -- a Radeon X1300).

 

I forgot to say that this graphics card is a PCI-Express (16x) slot card.

 

I decided that if I needed numbers to tell me my new card was faster then it surely wasn't going to be much faster. So I just uninstalled my old card and installed the new 8600 GT and I'm very pleased with it. I can run Oblivion with nearly all graphics settings maxed out. There are a few settings, like setting grass distance to max, I haven't tried at max yet as I don't think they'll make much difference anyway. But all the main graphics settings are at max and high detail is turned on and it's running fine -- no jerkiness and very responsive. So I'm very pleased with it so far.

Will try out S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in another day or two and see how that goes, but expect it will be fine. Unfortunately, I don't yet have Crysis, Supreme Commander, or Flight Simulator X which I guess are the really demanding games/sims currently so I can't report on those. But for $81 I'm quite pleased with this card.