I believe that should be prospective buyers in the last paragraph.

Otherwise, good review. I only have one question: Since the OC module is hardware-based, does it work under Linux too? If not I'd say it's pretty useless.

This review is WAY TOO LATE. The newly released 8800GT obsoletes basically all the other nvidia cards by being fast, cheap, quiet and low power.

Who in their right mind would choose any 8600* over the 8800GT now?

It's worrying how you nowadays tend to review stuff only when it's totally obsoleted by newer better products, just like the motherboard review you had lately.

^^ in the UK the 8800GT is almost 3x the price of the 8600GT, hardly cheap. they are cards in totally different market segment.

IMO it would have been a lot more interesting to review and compare several passively cooled 8600 GT cards.
The ones from Asus and Gigabyte drew some attention in the 'Cool and Quiet VGA' section of the forums.
Not for myself, I'm considering the new 8800 GT, after I find out which aftermarket cooler works best with it.

I agree with Tzupy. I was hoping for a review on the passive 8600GT or GTS card as well.

It's coming.... samples were not available at the time, but we just got one in today... along with a few new VGA cooler reviews.

surely that's an inevitable consequence of the incredibly rapid march of PC technology and the fact that all of SPCRs contributors do reviews as unpaid 2nd jobs (I think)?

I don't think anyone would object to more reviews on SPCR, but not many people are willing to either a) pay for them or b) accept the reduction in quality that would result

BTW MSI also do a nice heatpipe 8600GT that's currently no.1 in my virtual PC build.

Agreed. The review card is selling for ~$150; NCIX & TigerDirect in Canada are both selling 8800GT cards starting at around double the price.

the "Discuss" link at the end of the review, points to another thread !

I have essentially the same card, but without the OC software and front panel. I manually connected the fan to +5v from the power supply. The card is quiet and stays reasonably cool.