At the beginning of July we took a closer look at the low-end range from NVIDIA, the GeForce 8500 GT card to be precise. We compared that card to the older GeForce 7300 GT video cards, one equipped with DDR2, the other with GDDR3 memory. The outcome was a bit divided, the new GeForce 8500 GT did pretty good compared to the GeForce 7300 GT with DDR2, but the GDDR3 model was able to run on par mostly throughout the benchmarks. Now we have a GeForce 8500 GT equipped with 256MB GDDR3 memory chips, a copper heatsink with heat pipe and factory overclocked, can this Leadtek differentiate itself from the reference GeForce 8500 GT design? - Madshrimps

Leadtek WinFast PX8500 GT Extreme Edition Review

When Leadtek send us their WinFast PX8500 GT we weren't too excited at first, but then our eye saw the little sticker on the board that made us think twice. The WinFast PX8500 GT Extreme, comes with GDDR3 memory on-board, the original GeForce 8500 GT unit we checked previously had DDR2 memory. Can this memory bandwidth boost make a difference large enough worth noticing? Leadtek deviated from the NVIDIA reference design with this graphics card, which stipulates DDR2 usage for the GeForce 8500 GT GPU, and not only did they up the memory bandwidth, they also gave the GPU a boost.

Default clocks for the GPU is 450MHz for the reference GeForce 8500 GT, the WinFast PX8500 GT Extreme runs at 522MHz. Next to that the DDR2 memory speed on the reference board is 800MHz, with the GDDR3 memory this is boosted up to 1404MHz! Of course with the new GeForce 8 series card you are also enjoying DirectX 10 compatibility and full HD feature set to help you build a home theater PC. The retail box of the WinFast PX8500 GT gives you all the details on the front cover. The video card cooler is quite beefy too for a low-end product, complete copper construction with heatpipe to cool the core down.

As stated before, initially we didn't think much of yet another GeForce 8500 GT based video card, until we saw that Leadtek equipped theirs with GDDR3 memory and set higher default clock speeds. In our benchmarks performance increase was quite a lot better compared to the default DDR2 version, and this allowed us to run games at higher resolution and detail settings without them becoming slide shows. With a video card market filled by a large number of competitors who want you to buy their product, it's quite obvious that performance only won't decide if this product is a winner.

As it stands currently the WinFast PX8500 GT Extreme doesn't fail to impress performance wise, besting the DDR2 version easily, noise wise it's only noticeable under heavy loads, meaning overclocked the default heatsink keeping the GPU cool enough. The retail package is very complete with a free game included an excellent overclocking tools on the driver CD. Unfortunately the asking price is too close to that of the GeForce 8600 GT card which presents a better price to performance deal, if all you want is to play games.