Every graphics card manufacturer that uses Nvidia chips has made the most of the GeForce 8600 GTS. This chip-off-the-GeForce 8800 offers full support for DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4, so while it's rash to claim that any product is future-proof, the 8600 GTS is at least ready for the next generation of games such as Crysis that are due to hit the shops this Christmas.

In essence, the 8600 GTS is a faster version of the 8600 GT, but the difference is significant. With an 8600 GT you can play proper games like Oblivion and FEAR on a 19-inch TFT display and expect to get decent frame rates, but the extra grunt of the GTS allows you to bump up quality settings by enabling Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering

There's no doubt that the 8600 GTS is a good 'un, although a bit expensive, however there's very little to distinguish one model of 8600 GTS from another. They all have dual DVI outputs plus an S-Video connector, run the core at 675MHz and clock the 256MB of DDR3 memory at an effective speed of 2,000MHz. Some overclocked models are a fraction faster than that, but the differences are slight so the manufacturers have tended to resort to the old stand-by of a trick cooler that will distinguish their GTS from the herd.

And hasn't Gigabyte done a good job on this score, because the passive cooler on the NX86S256H is absolutely enormous. Gigabyte calls this design Silent-Pipe3 and it is notable that the finned aluminium heatsink sits on the graphics chip but is raised above the memory chips. It's so big that the graphics card requires two slots in your case instead of the usual one that you would expect with a mid-range graphics card.

The huge slab of finned aluminium is connected by two heatpipes to a secondary heat exchanger that projects slightly outside the case from the mounting bracket. It's battleship engineering that has been made necessary by the heat output from the 8600 GTS chip and, frankly, this is a problem.

Simply running Windows heated the graphics card to 55 degrees Celcius and running an intensive game lifted the temperature to 65 degrees. We were measuring the temperature at the heatsink and not simply relying on the drivers to tell us the temperature of the GPU, so we're talking about a whacking great slab of metal that is radiating a fair amount of heat inside the PC.

There's a benefit to this approach as the graphics card is completely silent, but we're none too impressed, as there are plenty of graphics card coolers with a large, slow fan that are effectively silent.

As for the rest of the package, Gigabyte supplies a copy of Supreme Commander, two DVI adapters and an HDTV splitter box for the TV-Out connector.

Gigabyte has worked hard to make this 8600 GTS graphics card silent but we feel that the effort has been misdirected. The performance is good - although you can't overclock the NX86S256H - and the price is fair, but blimey, it gets very toasty.