No dBA meter measurement here from us today .. what's the point eh ? It's passive cooling, you won't hear a thing. Yes :)
It's doesn't get any better than this, great stuff for sure.

Monitoring Graphics Core Heat

Since we tested a lot of GT and GTS models we'll now simply start adding temperature results into a graphical overview compared with other manufacturers.

Since utilizes a passive cooler, the product will have higher temperatures than average. Let's have a look. We measured at a room temperature of 22 Degrees C with our own RivaTuner (what else eh?).

For the chart, temperature is in Degrees Celsius: lower = better 

It still amazes me how well the passive cooler manages heat. But previous reviews already have shown that the 8600 GT doesn't have an externally warm GPU core when it's fully utilized. So the passive cooler can cope with this very well.

You do, and please remember this guys, you really do need to have some good ventilation inside your PC, as that passive cooler will dump it's heat inside your PC where a chain-reaction can occur .. it can heat up the entire PC.

But overall for passive cooling these are just beautiful results.

Le pouvoir "The Power"

We'll now show you some tests we have done on overall power consumption of the PC. Looking at it from a performance versus wattage point of view, the power consumption is really not bad. Our test system is a Core 2 Duo X6800 Extreme Processor, the nForce 680i SLI mainboard, a passive water-cooling solution on the CPU, DVD-ROM and WD Raptor drive. Have a look.

The methodology is simple: we look at the peak wattage during with the help of a wattage meter. our new meter can record the maximum power consumption from the PC. So after we have finished all out testing session, we look at that meter what the maximum power draw was. Please do understand that you are not looking at the power consumption of the graphics card, but the consumption of the entire PC. It's not the most objective way to test as you have to consider PSU efficiency as well, but it's the closest thing we can do though. We use a Galaxy 1 KW PSU with 80-85% efficiency.

We had a total system wattage peak at roughly 230-235 Watts which is the same for pretty much any 8600 edition card, it is definitely  not excessive.

My recommendations:

• A single GeForce 8600 GT/GTS requires you to have a 350 Watt power supply unit at minimum if you use it in a high-end system. That power supply needs to have (in total) at least 24 Amps available on the 12 volts rails.
• A second GeForce 8600 GT/GTS installed on this system requires you to have a 450 Watt power supply unit at minimum if you use it in a high-end system. That power supply needs to have (in total) at least 30 Amps available on the 12 volts rails.

There are many good PSU's out there, please do have a look at our many PSU reviews as we have loads of recommended PSU's for you to check out in there. What would happen if your PSU can't cope with the load?:

• bad 3D performance
• crashing games
• spontaneous reset or imminent shutdown of the PC
• freezes during gameplay
• PSU overload can cause it to break down

An example of how we measure.