GeForce 8600 GT vs Radeon HD 6930

Place in the ranking	537	1308
Place by popularity	not in top-100	not in top-100
Cost-effectiveness evaluation	2.13	no data
Power efficiency	2.73	0.47
Architecture	TeraScale 3 (2010−2013)	Tesla (2006−2010)
GPU code name	Cayman	G84
Market segment	Desktop	Desktop
Release date	1 December 2011 (12 years ago)	17 April 2007 (17 years ago)
Launch price (MSRP)	$180	$159

Cost-effectiveness evaluation

Performance to price ratio. The higher, the better.

HD 6930 and 8600 GT have a nearly equal value for money.

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	1280	32
Core clock speed	750 MHz	540 MHz
Number of transistors	2,640 million	289 million
Manufacturing process technology	40 nm	80 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	186 Watt	47 Watt
Texture fill rate	60.00	8.640
Floating-point processing power	1.92 TFLOPS	0.07616 TFLOPS
ROPs	32	8
TMUs	80	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 2.0 x16	PCIe 1.0 x16
Length	220 mm	170 mm
Width	2-slot	1-slot
Supplementary power connectors	2x 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	GDDR5	GDDR3
Maximum RAM amount	1 GB	512 MB
Standard memory config per GPU	no data	256 MB
Memory bus width	256 Bit	128 Bit
Memory clock speed	1200 MHz	700 MHz
Memory bandwidth	153.6 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	2x DVI, 1x HDMI, 2x mini-DisplayPort	2x DVI, 1x S-Video
HDMI	+	-

API compatibility

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

DirectX	11.2 (11_0)	11.1 (10_0)
Shader Model	5.0	4.0
OpenGL	4.4	2.1
OpenCL	1.2	1.1
Vulkan	N/A	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	7.27	0.32
Recency	1 December 2011	17 April 2007
Maximum RAM amount	1 GB	512 MB
Chip lithography	40 nm	80 nm
Power consumption (TDP)	186 Watt	47 Watt

HD 6930 has a 2171.9% higher aggregate performance score, an age advantage of 4 years, a 100% higher maximum VRAM amount, and a 100% more advanced lithography process.

8600 GT, on the other hand, has 295.7% lower power consumption.

The Radeon HD 6930 is our recommended choice as it beats the GeForce 8600 GT in performance tests.

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