As you all know, XFX is a global presence in the world of electronic gaming. With its focus on taking gaming to the extreme, XFX has developed an exciting array of graphics cards and accessories that are designed to maximize the entire entertainment experience. The XFX Fatal1ty series have recently not only been upgraded in the mainstream segment, since few weeks we have now Fatal1ty entry-level graphics cards. Aimed at the professional gaming market, could we have a best buy in our hands? Previous samples gave us the opportunity to test some of XFX's finest video cards, the Fatal1ty line-up has brought us maximum performance although success was not always that great. - Madshrimps

XFX GeForce 8500 GT 512MB Fatal1ty Edition Review

The Fatal1ty series come with dominating red and black tints, the GeForce 8500 GT is no exception. Jonathan Wendell is also present in large, if you're seriously looking for Fatal1ty products you just can't miss them at your local retailer. The design is fine although that it is nothing more then a package, it's the inside what counts the most. Size is far from ordinary, we followed our instinct and did not expect too much either inside the box. Unfortunately, their is no DVI to HDMI adapter added and neither did the manual provide much info. Nonetheless the package holds all what you can expect and used to from XFX.

People looking to push more frame rates out of this video card can always add a fan, although adding an aftermarket cooler shouldn't be that hard either, this card comes with multiple mounting holes which are only good with compatibility in mind. This video card is equipped with an NVIDIA SLI bridge and the PCB itself is rather small compared to current mainstream products. Greenish DVI port, and for older CRT monitors an analog VGA port connector. Also notice the height of the heatsink, the card is single slot and should provide no issues during install. And it certainly will be very quiet due the passive cooling.

Before we draw any conclusions let us tell you that this product is in fact a limited edition made for BestBuy only, so you won't find this card anywhere else, neither in online shops, neither on XFX's products list. Nonetheless, that does not affect our way of benchmarking, we checked the GeForce 8500 GT Fatal1ty like we would have done with any other video card. The GeForce 8500 GT Fatal1ty is in real life far from ordinary, its looks matches those of XFX's normal passive GeForce 8500 GT and with the minor clock speeds increase only it is far from superior either. At least that is our opinion.

Our game tests reflects how the increased clocks make the Fatal1ty edition a bit faster than reference GeForce 8500 GT's with DDR2 memory. That did leave us with a nice margin to play around with, and our sample overclocked very well considering its cooling system and we obtained a decent speed increase compared to reference clocked GeForce 8500 GT's. Another negative point is the 512MB of DDR2 memory, and we agree, more is better, but the GeForce 8500 GPU is not really fast enough to render the image details which requires more then 256MB, the extra memory makes it worse due to the higher price.

The passive cooled heatsink is a bonus though, together with the on-board digital sound plug those are the only real goodies we could find with this product. Price wise you can count on paying quite a bit extra for this limited edition up to $150 where the normal XFX GeForce 8500 GT is being sold for $90, for us that just doesn't weight up. In the end, we think we can conclude that this card is not what the gamers are looking for, but it would do fine for home theatre PC users if XFX could add a DVI to HDMI converter, and off course lower the retail price.