It's been a while since we have seen anything from Gigabyte. The main reason for this isn't because they don't like us; rather the company tends to want to stand out from the pack when it comes to their products. Anyone can send us a graphics card with stock clocks and stock cooling but Gigabyte always try to do something a bit different with their lineup of graphics cards. The latest card to get the makeover treatment is the Gigabyte GeForce 8500 GT Turbo Force Ultra. The name alone sounds cool and has us so very intrigued, just imagine what the card is going to look like. Well, a GeForce 8500 GT on steroids, a quite capable card for gaming in fact. - TweakTown

Gigabyte GeForce 8500 GT Turbo Force Ultra Review

The GeForce 8500 GT in base form isn't the card of choice for a lot of people, while it's cheap it's not much of a performer and if you're not going to game you would find yourself looking at the cheaper again GeForce 8400 GS. If you do want to do a bit of gaming the extra money is usually worth being spent to enter the GeForce 8600 series. Hopefully Gigabyte has done big things with the GeForce 8500 GT and its something that we can find ourselves recommending to people. With most of the box covered in the Dawn of War theme there is still some important information scattered over it.

We can of course see the model and some of the main features like PCI Express, DirectX 10, HDCP, HDTV and 256MB of GDDR3 memory. We also see mention of the fact that all solid capacitors are used along with the mention of Turbo Force and what it does for us. Turning the box over we have some more detail on what the GeForce 8 series of NVIDIA cards can offer you along with a little blurb about the Gigabyte model and how it boasts cinematic gaming effects, without breaking the bank. Overall the package is pretty good but what it's missing is some cables, so you might need to get some separately.

This is where it becomes interesting, the card is clearly out of the ordinary, the whole cooler is quite full on and in your face. The big gold heatsink looks great with the Gigabyte logo up top with a little silver shard on the left side of the cooler that shows us this model is part of the Turbo Force series. The cooler pretty much takes up the whole front if the card and a little bit more. On the right of the card the heatsink continues going over the edge of the card making it a little longer than your standard GeForce 8500 GT. This particular cooler uses the 3D-Active fan feature which is a fancy name for fan only spins in games.

Looking at the specifications the card is pretty hard core, the stock GeForce 8500 GT sports DDR2 at 800MHz effective. Gigabyte's Turbo Force not only packs GDDR3 memory like the GeForce 8600 GT but also carries with it the same 1400MHz effective memory clock. The core and shader clocks come in at 450MHz and 900MHz respectively on the stock GeForce 8500 GT. The GeForce 8600 GT offers 540MHz and 1180MHz while the Turbo Force Ultra from Gigabyte carries 600MHz on the core and a hefty 1300MHz shader clock. It's not all rosy though, as it still features only 16 stream processors.

Making a GeForce 8500 GT that is worth owning can't be an easy job but it seems that Gigabyte has managed to do it. The performance when compared to a stock GeForce 8500 GT is simply mind boggling with the card capable of performing twice as fast as the stock GeForce 8500 GT during some points. What really gets you with this card though is the quality, it just feels fantastic. The look of the cooler, the way it clips onto the back of the card to stay secure just makes it one of the best built mid-range cards we have ever had the pleasure of dealing with.

Apart from the size this card would be great for a home theater environment as you get the GeForce 8 series HD processing power and don't have to deal with the noise. At the same time though if you want to fire up a game the card is capable of doing this too. We should see the card pop up on store shelves in the coming weeks and hopefully the price sits below the GeForce 8600 GT. The card really is a clear winner and it's nice to see that Gigabyte can make a boring card like the GeForce 8500 GT quite exciting.