GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 vs GeForce GT 450 (OEM)

Intro

The GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 has a clock speed of 540 MHz and a DDR2 memory speed of 400 MHz. It also makes use of a 128-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 80 nm design. It is comprised of 32 SPUs, 16 Texture Address Units, and 8 Raster Operation Units.

Compare all of that to the GeForce GT 450 (OEM), which has core clock speeds of 790 MHz on the GPU, and 1000 MHz on the 1536 MB of GDDR5 RAM. It features 144 SPUs as well as 24 TAUs and 24 ROPs.

Price Comparison

Please note that the price comparisons are based on search keywords, and might not be the exact same card listed on this page. We have no control over the accuracy of their search results.

GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2 Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

GeForce GT 450 (OEM) Amazon.com Other US-based stores Amazon.co.uk Amazon.de Amazon.fr

Specifications

Model	GeForce 8600 GT 512MB DDR2	GeForce GT 450 (OEM)
Manufacturer	nVidia	nVidia
Year	April 2007	October 2010
Code Name	G84	GF106
Fab Process	80 nm	40 nm
Bus	PCIe x16	PCIe x16
Memory	512 MB	1536 MB
Core Speed	540 MHz	790 MHz
Shader Speed	1180 MHz	1580 MHz
Memory Speed	400 MHz (800 MHz effective)	1000 MHz (4000 MHz effective)
Unified Shaders	32	144
Texture Mapping Units	16	24
Render Output Units	8	24
Bus Type	DDR2	GDDR5
Bus Width	128-bit	192-bit
DirectX Version	DirectX 10	DirectX 11
OpenGL Version	OpenGL 3.0	OpenGL 4.1
Power (Max TDP)	47 watts	106 watts
Shader Model	4.0	5.0
Bandwidth	12800 MB/sec	96000 MB/sec
Texel Rate	8640 Mtexels/sec	18960 Mtexels/sec
Pixel Rate	4320 Mpixels/sec	18960 Mpixels/sec

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the maximum amount of information (counted in MB per second) that can be transported over the external memory interface in one second. It's worked out by multiplying the card's bus width by its memory clock speed. If it uses DDR type memory, it must be multiplied by 2 once again. If DDR5, multiply by ANOTHER 2x. The higher the card's memory bandwidth, the faster the card will be in general. It especially helps with anti-aliasing, High Dynamic Range and higher screen resolutions.

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

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum number of pixels the graphics card can possibly record to its local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. Pixel rate is worked out by multiplying the amount of ROPs by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - also sometimes called Render Output Units) are responsible for outputting the pixels (image) to the screen. The actual pixel rate also depends on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the ability to reach the maximum fill rate.