GeForce 8600 GT vs FirePro D500

Place in the ranking	427	1309
Place by popularity	not in top-100	not in top-100
Power efficiency	2.71	0.47
Architecture	GCN 1.0 (2011−2020)	Tesla (2006−2010)
GPU code name	Tahiti	G84
Market segment	Workstation	Desktop
Release date	18 January 2014 (10 years ago)	17 April 2007 (17 years ago)
Launch price (MSRP)	no data	$159

Cost-effectiveness evaluation

Performance to price ratio. The higher, the better.

no data

Detailed specifications

General parameters such as number of shaders, GPU core base clock and boost clock speeds, manufacturing process, texturing and calculation speed. Note that power consumption of some graphics cards can well exceed their nominal TDP, especially when overclocked.

Pipelines / CUDA cores	1536	32
Core clock speed	725 MHz	540 MHz
Number of transistors	4,313 million	289 million
Manufacturing process technology	28 nm	80 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	274 Watt	47 Watt
Texture fill rate	69.60	8.640
Floating-point processing power	2.227 TFLOPS	0.07616 TFLOPS
ROPs	32	8
TMUs	96	16

Form factor & compatibility

Information on compatibility with other computer components. Useful when choosing a future computer configuration or upgrading an existing one. For desktop graphics cards it's interface and bus (motherboard compatibility), additional power connectors (power supply compatibility).

Interface	PCIe 3.0 x16	PCIe 1.0 x16
Length	279 mm	170 mm
Width	2-slot	1-slot
Supplementary power connectors	no data	None
SLI options	-	+

VRAM capacity and type

Parameters of VRAM installed: its type, size, bus, clock and resulting bandwidth. Integrated GPUs have no dedicated video RAM and use a shared part of system RAM.

Memory type	GDDR5	GDDR3
Maximum RAM amount	3 GB	512 MB
Standard memory config per GPU	no data	256 MB
Memory bus width	384 Bit	128 Bit
Memory clock speed	1270 MHz	700 MHz
Memory bandwidth	243.8 GB/s	22.4 GB/s

Connectivity and outputs

Types and number of video connectors present on the reviewed GPUs. As a rule, data in this section is precise only for desktop reference ones (so-called Founders Edition for NVIDIA chips). OEM manufacturers may change the number and type of output ports, while for notebook cards availability of certain video outputs ports depends on the laptop model rather than on the card itself.

Display Connectors

6x mini-DisplayPort, 1x SDI

2x DVI, 1x S-Video

API compatibility

List of supported 3D and general-purpose computing APIs, including their specific versions.

DirectX	12 (11_1)	11.1 (10_0)
Shader Model	5.1	4.0
OpenGL	4.6	2.1
OpenCL	1.2	1.1
Vulkan	1.2.131	N/A
CUDA	-	1.1

Gaming performance

Let's see how good the compared graphics cards are for gaming. Particular gaming benchmark results are measured in FPS.

Pros & cons summary

Performance score	10.84	0.32
Recency	18 January 2014	17 April 2007
Maximum RAM amount	3 GB	512 MB
Chip lithography	28 nm	80 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	274 Watt	47 Watt

FirePro D500 has a 3287.5% higher aggregate performance score, an age advantage of 6 years, a 500% higher maximum VRAM amount, and a 185.7% more advanced lithography process.

8600 GT, on the other hand, has 483% lower power consumption.

The FirePro D500 is our recommended choice as it beats the GeForce 8600 GT in performance tests.

Be aware that FirePro D500 is a workstation graphics card while GeForce 8600 GT is a desktop one.

Should you still have questions concerning choice between the reviewed GPUs, ask them in Comments section, and we shall answer.