11. Gigabyte GeForce 8600GT Silent Pipe II Graphics Card

Those folks with students in their lives who are also computerphiles are lucky in some ways. That is because they can always resort to "the next big thing" - or some reasonable facsimile thereof - when it comes to choosing gifts for such offspring, relatives or friends as may fit into this category. Gigabyte’s new GV-NX86T256H Nvidia 8600-based graphics card isn’t necessarily the fastest or the most powerful of such things available, but it does have some great features designed to appeal to DIY computer builders and users.

The entire surface of the GeForce 8600GT is covered with a sizable set of cooling fins.

Nvidia’s 8600-class cards represent the latest-and-greatest Nvidia graphics circuitry, though they lack the sheer power and number of shaders, physics effects and so forth found in more powerful 8800 rigs. They do support DirectX 10 graphics used in Vista, and can offload encoding and decoding (codec) functions from the CPU when handling compressed video formats such as MPEG-2 or MPEG-4. The 8600 cards also support the High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) necessary to handle high-definition DVD formats such as Blu-ray and HD-DVD, then hand that video off through the High Definition Multimedia Interface to an HDTV set.

The circuitry in the GV-NX86T256H certainly deserves some awe and wonder, too. The 8600 GPU runs at 560 MHz and accesses its 256 MB of DDR3 video RAM at four times that speed, or 1.36 GHz. We’ve observed improvements of 20%-25% in CPU utilization while performing decodes or transcodes of various types of video data, thanks to the 8600’s on-board codec circuitry. The unit’s dual DVI-I ports can drive displays with resolutions up to 2560x1600. Gigabyte also makes much of the unit’s GigaThread Technology, which creates and runs thousands of simultaneous execution threads to improve performance for shader programs in games and 3D rendering. Likewise, its support for Quantum Effects Technology for physics simulation, and the Lumenex engine that supports 16x Anti-aliasing and 128-bit floating point high-dynamic range (HDR) rendering for lighting effects, really adds to this card’s punch and power.

At street prices from $185 to $215, this card offers terrific graphics capabilities at an affordable price. Whether your intended back-to-schooler is a gamer or a multimedia maven, he or she won’t be able to avoid cracking a smile when the contents of this massive box are revealed. If you really want to get them going, you might consider getting one of the new P35 Gigabyte motherboards - either the DDR2 P35-DQ6 or the DDR3 P35T-DQ6 - for them to drop the graphics card into