The GeForce 8500 GT is NVIDIA's value priced contender in the GeForce 8 series. The GeForce 8500 GT has a 450MHz core clock and 800MHz memory clock, but how is this $100 creation able to compete against other graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA? We have our hands on the passively cooled Gigabyte GeForce 8500 GT 256MB graphics card and have run our usual graphics tests along with some of our first overclocking attempts with this new solution. Last week NVIDIA introduced the GeForce 8500 and 8600 series as the midrange DirectX 10 graphics cards to accompany the already existing high-end GeForce 8800 series. - Phonorix

Gigabyte GeForce 8500 GT 256MB Graphics Review

NVIDIA's reference specifications for the GeForce 8500 GT call for 16 stream processors, a 450MHz core clock, with a 900MHz shader clock, and a 800MHz memory clock. There are both 256MB and 512MB varieties for the GeForce 8500 GT but the card we are exploring today only offers 128-bit 256MB DDR2 memory. However, the card we are running today, a Gigabyte, is slightly different. Rather than running the G86 core at 450MHz speed, it has been factory overclocked to 500MHz. This video card is also completely fanless being cooled by a large copper heatsink, a so called passive cooling solution.

Looking over the results at hand, the NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT is a decent performer. However, this is under Linux. We cannot say for certain how well the G86 will perform under Microsoft Windows XP or Vista, but our most recent NVIDIA driver studies have shown the Linux and Windows drivers are on par with one another. Thus you can expect the GeForce 8500 GT to perform roughly the same whether it be Windows or Linux. On the ATI side, however, the results tell a much different story. In some benchmarks the $100 NVIDIA GPU had outperformed ATI's Radeon X1950 PRO due to the sluggish state of the drivers.

When it comes to the other cards, the GeForce 6600 GT had outperformed the GeForce 8500 GT, while the GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB had of course led the pact. As far as the overclocking goes, we were pleased that Gigabyte had managed to factory overclock the G86 core by 50MHz, and when using CoolBits for Linux we were able to add on another 50MHz to the GPU. However, the passively cooled Gigabyte GeForce 8500 GT could not handle much more than that and is not designed for overclocking. After using the card for a few days now, we see this budget GPU as being an excellent candidate for a multimedia box.