8500 GT Video Card - Direct X 10

This card, as well as any in the 8000 line-up, is fully supported for Direct X 10. This is a big upgrade and should be a serious consideration when buying a new graphics card. As new as Direct X 10 is, just on the horizon is Direct X 10.1. Please consider this in choosing a card.

The way I see it, the next generation of graphics cards are going to be 10.1 compatible, and this generation won’t be. My recommendation would be to buy a mid range card now, such as the 8500 GT, and save for a nice new 10.1 card in a few months. I see benefits to getting a Dirext X 10 card now instead of waiting. Vista is here now, and games are coming out that are programmed in Direct X 10. In order to get full fledged gaming you need a Direct X 10 card.

What you get

Here is a quick look at what you get: 

• GeForce 8500 GT graphics card
• Driver CD
• S-Video cable
• DVI adapter

There's nothing interesting here; it's just what you normally would get with a budget card. So it's time to take a closer look at the card.

The first thing I noticed about this card was the fact it was passively cooled. This isn’t a good thing as far as overclocking. For overclocking, we will need a fan over this card actively cooling it. This card wasn’t made by nVidia for a passive cooled cooler; XFX has done some research and found a way to passively cool the core. The card even has a fan plug for connecting a fan. We will be utilizing this later on. The rest of the card's layout is very clean, and no additional power is needed.

On the top we find an SLI connector. I’m not sure how effective this will be. We can already SLI two of these cards over the PCI-Express bus, and the external bridge only really helps for higher end cards that will fill up the bus. To prove this, many 8500 GTs don’t have the SLI connector at all on the top. I don’t see any gains from running SLI over a bridge vs. the PCI-Express interlink.

Here we find dual DVI and an S-video. Does anyone still have a normal D-Sub connector on their cards? Many monitors are still made without DVI so why eliminate it from the card? You do get two converters to get D-Sub connections though, which is nice.

The card is slightly shorter then the 8600 GT. Neither is long at all, so fitting it into any case shouldn’t be a problem.

This low end card doesn’t require any other power sources to run. With a moderate CPU, one could get away with a sub 500 watt PSU without a problem.

Next: Testing >>
 

More Video Cards Articles
More By jkabaseball