GeForce 8600 GTS vs GeForce GT 430 (OEM)

Intro

Compare those specs to the GeForce GT 430 (OEM), which comes with GPU clock speed of 700 MHz, and 2048 MB of GDDR3 memory set to run at 900 MHz through a 128-bit bus. It also is comprised of 96 Stream Processors, 16 Texture Address Units, and 4 ROPs.

Display Graphs

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Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		60 Watts
GeForce 8600 GTS		75 Watts
	Difference: 15 Watts (25%)

Memory Bandwidth

Theoretically speaking, the GeForce 8600 GTS should be just a bit faster than the GeForce GT 430 (OEM) overall. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GTS		32000 MB/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		28800 MB/sec
	Difference: 3200 (11%)

Texel Rate

The GeForce GT 430 (OEM) will be a little bit (approximately 4%) faster with regards to anisotropic filtering than the GeForce 8600 GTS. (explain)

GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		11200 Mtexels/sec
GeForce 8600 GTS		10800 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 400 (4%)

Pixel Rate

The GeForce 8600 GTS will be much (more or less 93%) better at FSAA than the GeForce GT 430 (OEM), and will be capable of handling higher resolutions better. (explain)

GeForce 8600 GTS		5400 Mpixels/sec
GeForce GT 430 (OEM)		2800 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 2600 (93%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the max amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transferred over the external memory interface in a second. The number is calculated by multiplying the interface width by its memory clock speed. If the card has DDR memory, it must be multiplied by 2 again. If DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The better the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, HDR and high resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum texture map elements (texels) that can be processed in one second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total amount of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The higher the texel rate, the better the graphics card will be at handling texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels per second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels that the graphics chip can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is calculated by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core speed of the card. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also called Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel output rate is also dependant on lots of other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the memory bandwidth is, the lower the ability to get to the maximum fill rate.