OCWorkbench reports that the GeForce 8600 GTS and GT will both have 32 stream processors. That's a third as many as Nvidia's existing GeForce 8800 GTS and GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB cards, which both have 96 stream processors The cheaper 8500GT has only 16 Stream processors. OCWorkbench also says the GeForce 8600 GTS will have a stock core clock speed of 675MHz as well as 256MB of GDDR3 memory, which will run at a stock speed of 1GHz and pump data through a 128-bit bus. That said, the site claims that most retail cards will be overclocked to a core speed of 700MHz and a memory speed of 1.2GHz. The GeForce 8600 GTS will reportedly have maximum power draw of 71W, while the GeForce 8600 GT will only sip up to 43W. The number of transistors on 8600GTS and 8600GT is 289 million while the 8500GT has 210 million transistors.

In preliminary benchmarks, the 8600GTS performs on pair/worse than a X1950Pro which is 50$ cheaper. Heh, it looks like a reminiscent of the FX5200/5600 series, where you got quite good DX8 performance and some DX9 check-box features, barely useful...:-(