At a recent briefing for AMD's latest entry and mid-range cards, the Radeon HD 2400 and HD 2600 series, we were told an interesting little tidbit that AMD had found out. It turns out that a lot of the customers buying their previous entry-level cards, the Radeon X1300, had bought it mainly for playing games. Even AMD was surprised that people would first spend as little as possible on the video card. So let me start by telling you that if your main objective is to play games, you probably should spend a bit more cash on another card. When it comes to gaming this card is meant as an upgrade to on-board graphics. Luckily it has some nice tricks making it an great card for home theater PC builders. - Bjorn3D

Gigabyte GeForce 8500 GT Turbo Force Card Review

The GeForce 8500 GT is NVIDIA's entry level DirectX 10 GPU. While retaining all the features of its more powerful siblings, it is quite cut down in the performance department. Gigabyte has really cranked the core clock of the GPU and memory up. It should help the performance, at least compared to a regular GeForce 8500 GT. The card comes in a big green box which has a fantasy scene out of the game Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War on it. That is not surprising since the game is included in the bundle. On the back of the box we find the usual marketing spin on how great the card is.

The card itself looks really good. It has a blue PCB and a huge gold heatsink covering most of the front. In the heatsink there is a small fan. On all the connectors Gigabyte has put a blue cover. We are not sure how necessary this really is but it is a nice touch. The solid capacitors give the board a high quality look. The software that is included allows you to overclock the card. You can either choose to overclock it to a fixed clock speed or let the application dynamically overclock the card. When allowing dynamically change the clock speed, the software directly increased the speed to 610MHz instead of 600MHz.

The Gigabyte 8500GT Turbo Force slots in between the Radeon HD 2400 XT and the Radeon HD 2600 XT while coming far behind the GeForce 8600 GT. As a on-board video upgrade it works fine and you can actually get decent performance from older games if you turn down the quality settings and resolution. We are not sure how it will handle the future games though. And with full HDCP support and hardware H.264 decoding support, the Gigabyte 8500 GT Turbo Force is the perfect card for a home theater PC. The only issue is the drivers from NVIDIA which still have some issues displaying HD video.

Gigabyte has done a good job with the GeForce 8500 GT GPU. They overclocked it, added a nice fan and bundled the card with a good game. Unfortunately the GeForce 8500 GT GPU itself is quite slow so this limits what magic Gigabyte can do with it as well as limits the target audience. As an upgrade to on-board video or as a card in a high-end home theater PC, the Gigabyte 8500 GT Turbo Force however works well. The only caveat is that the cards get hot so good ventilation is needed in the case.