One of the segments that we quite honestly didn't pay much attention to is the low-end and budget market for graphics cards. We are a pretty high-end enthusiast targeted and therefore we aren't really eager to look a bit deeper at the mid-range mainstream level. That doesn't mean that there isn't any market for budget level products, contrary it's supposedly the biggest market available. One company who has been OEM manufacturing for many years now is ECS, when you buy a complete PC at decent prices, chances are quite high there's an ECS component in there. ECS however also is trying to penetrate the retail market, with a focus and low-end and mid-range products that is. - Guru3D

ECS GeForce 8500 GT 512MB Graphics Card Review

Since we never took a look at a GeForce 8500 based graphics card to date we gladly accepted the offer to submit such a card to us. So in house today we will be looking at a graphics card that we would probably never buy, a GeForce 8500 GT. It's probably one of the cheapest graphics cards money can buy. Now we had to do at the very least a little exorbitant so we did opted for the 512MB model, hey it's still priced around $100 with that kind of memory. And low-end or not we must say we had a hell of a good time with this card. Overclocking and tweaking was so much fun, we boosted quite some performance out of this card.

We are looking at the GeForce 8500 cards today, and it's one of the most affordable DirectX 10 hardware on the market. The primary difference between GeForce 8 and GeForce 7 families is the adoption of DirectX 10 on the GeForce 8 family. This means they will support the next generation of games to be released this year. Although in all honestly, you really can't play any DirectX 10 game with this kind of budget card though. At roughly 90 bucks this card is competing with ATI's Radeon HD 2400 series of products. The GPU on this card is labelled G86, GeForce 8500 GT and is based on a 80nm fabrication process.

The ECS card is factory clocked 460/666MHz while NVIDIA's reference GeForce 8500 GT's are clocked at 450/800MHz. See it's all about shader cores versus memory versus clock speeds. Where a GeForce 8800 GTS has 96 shader cores and a GeForce 8600 GT has 32, which already is too little the GeForce 8500 GT has only 16 stream processors. Much like it's bigger GeForce 8600 brother, the GeForce 8500 has to deal with it's memory bandwidth over a 128-bit memory bus. In fact, the GeForce 8500 GT really is a castrated GeForce 8600 GT and the performance results will show that clearly.

You can pickup this card in it's 512MB flavor for roughly $80-90. Now if you are a pure bred gamer, we just can't recommend it to you. Honestly, it's fun to have a DirectX 10 compatible card, yet with 16 shader cores you just can't achieve much performance. An exactly similar priced Radeon HD 2600 XT will cost the same yet offer better performance in any scenario plus it will offer full HD decoding. If we flip it the other way around, then we must say this card offers a lot of such a small amount of money. You have all the nifty features an GeForce 8 series card has, with full Windows Vista support.

ECS did a really fine job with this card though, performance as expected, good quality build, great overclocking potential and all that at a fair price. These are the four key items that you need to keep in mind if you are in the market for a budget graphics card and plan nothing else to do than generic desktop usage and play an older game every once in a while.