Gainward delivers pointless 8600

Yes, that is a stunning amount of RAM - the most ever seen on a GeForce card of this spec, in fact. And yes, the 8600 is a pretty decent card. But there is no way on earth that you're going to hit the ceiling on the amount of RAM on a standard 8600 card before you hit the ceiling on the amount of raw horsepower in the GPU.

In short, it's fairly certain that half of that 1GB is going to be sitting on its butt the majority of the time, while the GPU wheezes through more calculations.

Which isn't to say that a graphics board with 1GB of RAM doesn't make for some severe bragging rights. Or an easy sales pitch, for that matter - PC World was, back in the day, stocked up to the gunnels with GeForce FX 5200 cards with stupid amounts of memory, purely because a larger amount of memory makes it appear more powerful to the average consumer, regardless of the actual performance benefit that memory will bring in the real world.

Could Gainward possibly be exploiting this trend? We dare not contemplate. µ