8500 GT Video Card - Testing
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We will see how well this card does in games and benchmarks, and compare it to its higher end brother, the 8600 GT. I will also overclock the 8500 GT, and see how close I can get to the performance of the 8600 GT. The rest of the test computer is composed of the following:
Overclocking
I wasn’t expecting much from this card. Lower range cards tend not to overclock very well. To begin with, I immediately put a 120mm fan over the heatsink. We just gave this passively cooled card a killer heatsink. I was very impressed with the results. I managed to take the core from 500 MHz stock to 700 MHz; that’s a 200 MHz gain. The memory wasn’t as great as the core, only managing to get up to 400 MHz, but I wouldn’t expect it to be. XFX probably just stuck RAM on there that was capable of the stock speed and not much more. Why should XFX spend more on higher speed memory when it won’t be utilized?
3DMark 06
This is the benchmark of benchmarks. Everyone will benchmark different games, but you will always see this benchmark run.
The 8500 GT had no chance of catching up in this benchmark. This benchmark is made to compare the absolute most performance you can get out of a card. Yes, there was a nice little increase in performance when overclocked, but it's still in a different ball park compared to the 8600 GT.
Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
Half-Life 2 was a great game, and this was a little present people got that showed us what they were able to do with Half-Life 2. The Lost Coast offers hi-res textures and also the use of High Dynamic Range Lighting.
The 8500 GT really closed the gap when overclocked. I was very surprised with the big increase in FPS with just a clock increase when the 8600 GT has many more stream processes.
Next: Testing continued >>
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