I'm definitely not what you would call a cutting-edge gamer. You'll never see me shell out $500 for the latest hardware or stand in line to pay $50 for that newest game release. I tend to buy more mainstream performance cards and the games I play are nearly always last season's hits. I look for the deals and tend to take a "wait and see" approach to determine how well a piece of hardware/software is received before laying down my money. Call me frugal, that's just the way I am.

When it comes to hardware, some people are pretty one-sided about their video card preference too, and I'm no exception. I entered the 3D gaming scene many years ago with 3dfx and naturally migrated to nVidia after that. As it happens to work out, I've only upgraded my graphics card every other generation, from Voodoo3 to GeForce2, Ti4200 to 6600, so advances in technology and the level of improvement over previous GPU's has always been significant. Following that progression it's clearly apparent that I'm about due for an 8000 series card, which leads us to this review of the MSI 8600GTS OC.

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