GeForce GT 640 Rev. 2 vs 8600 GTS

Place in the ranking	1251	731
Place by popularity	not in top-100	not in top-100
Cost-effectiveness evaluation	0.01	0.19
Power efficiency	0.51	5.03
Architecture	Tesla (2006−2010)	Kepler 2.0 (2013−2015)
GPU code name	G84	GK208
Market segment	Desktop	Desktop
Release date	17 April 2007 (17 years ago)	29 May 2013 (11 years ago)
Launch price (MSRP)	$199	$89

Cost-effectiveness evaluation

The higher the performance-to-price ratio, the better. We use the manufacturer's recommended prices for comparison.

GT 640 Rev. 2 has 1800% better value for money than 8600 GTS.

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	32	384
Core clock speed	675 MHz	1046 MHz
Number of transistors	289 million	915 million
Manufacturing process technology	80 nm	28 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	60 Watt	49 Watt
Texture fill rate	10.80	33.47
Floating-point processing power	0.0928 TFLOPS	0.8033 TFLOPS
ROPs	8	8
TMUs	16	32

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 1.0 x16	PCIe 2.0 x8
Length	198 mm	145 mm
Width	1-slot	1-slot
Supplementary power connectors	1x 6-pin	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	GDDR3	GDDR5
Maximum RAM amount	256 MB	1 GB
Standard memory config per GPU	256 MB	no data
Memory bus width	128 Bit	64 Bit
Memory clock speed	1000 MHz	1252 MHz
Memory bandwidth	32 GB/s	40.06 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	2x DVI, 1x S-Video	1x DVI, 1x HDMI, 1x VGA
HDMI	-	+

API and SDK compatibility

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

DirectX	11.1 (10_0)	12 (11_0)
Shader Model	4.0	5.1
OpenGL	2.1	4.6
OpenCL	1.1	1.2
Vulkan	N/A	1.1.126
CUDA	1.1	3.5

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	0.43	3.45
Recency	17 April 2007	29 May 2013
Maximum RAM amount	256 MB	1 GB
Chip lithography	80 nm	28 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	60 Watt	49 Watt

GT 640 Rev. 2 has a 702.3% higher aggregate performance score, an age advantage of 6 years, a 300% higher maximum VRAM amount, a 185.7% more advanced lithography process, and 22.4% lower power consumption.

The GeForce GT 640 Rev. 2 is our recommended choice as it beats the GeForce 8600 GTS in performance tests.

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