Unfortunately I had to replace my entire system to accomodate the change to socket AM2, DDR2 and PCIe, so I can't do any meaningful benchmarks, but there are plenty of general 8600GTS benchmarks out there anyway.
But that's not the most important thing anyway; what I'm interested in is how hot it gets (a reflection of both the effectiveness of the heatsink and the card's power consumption), and here are some numbers:
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Idle:
Ambient: 21ºC
Case: 29ºC
GPU: 46ºC
Load:
Ambient: 21ºC
Case: 29ºC
GPU: 51-57ºC
Idle temperatures were measured when just browsing the web. Load temperatures were measured after running UT2004 for a while. Load temperatures fluctuated up and down a lot, mostly not going above 54ºC except for one peak of 57. The heatsink was quite warm to the touch.
The card runs at the standard speed of 675MHz core, 1000MHz memory.
The case has two 80mm intake fans run at 7V, an 80mm top exhaust fan run at 5V, a rear 80mm exhaust fan that's supposed to be temperature controlled but I haven't set that up with the new mobo yet (seems to run at about 1200rpm right now), plus a 120mm temperature controlled fan in the PSU which didn't seem to go very fast during testing. The 70mm CPU fan runs at full pelt due to the mobo not yet being able to read the temperature from Brisbane CPUs (AMD changed the way temp. is reported, apparently), but it doesn't point at the graphics card and so should not make much difference.
Pretty good overall, considering that I get better performance than my old 6800GT, which ran up into the 70s with a Thermalright V1-ultra with 7V fan.
But this is just all boring facts and stuff, when pretty pictures are more fun (click to enlarge):
The above picture shows that it's a single-slot card - unless you have a slot above the graphics card perhaps.
Here you can see the size of the radiator part. It sticks out over the end a bit, making the card slightly longer than it would otherwise be, but it's still reasonably sized.
Underneath. The heatsink is very solidly constructed, mostly from aluminium, with a copper baseplate that covers both the GPU and RAM. The only downside is that the heatpipes are bare copper, which means that acidic fingerprints must be kept well clear to avoid unsightly stains!