ECS GeForce 8500 GT 512MB review

Posted by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 09/04/2007 01:00 PM [ 0 comment(s) ]

Page 2 (Intro)

GeForce 8500 GT innards

Alright folks, let's have a look at some product specs that I placed into this really endearing table.

	GeForce 8500 GT	GeForce 8600 GT	GeForce 8600 GTS
Stream Processors	16	32	32
Core clock (MHz)	450	540	675
Shader clock (MHz)	900	1180	1450
Memory clock (MHz) x2	400	700	1000
Memory	DDR2	gDDR3	gDDR3
Memory bus	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit
Memory bandwidth (GB/sec)	12.8	22.4	32
Transistor count	210	289	289
HDCP compatible	No	No	Yes

We are looking at the 8500 cards today, so let's keep focus on that one. 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 DX10 game with this kind of budget card though.

At roughly 90 bucks this card is competing with ATI's HD 2400 series of products.

The GPU on this card is labelled G86 (GeForce 8500 GT) and is based on a 80nm fabrication process. Geek facts; it has 210 million transistors, 16 stream processors and makes use of 128-bit interface to transport data over it's gDDR2 memory.

The ECS card is factory clocked 460/333 while nVidias references 8500s are clocked at 450/800. See it's all about shader cores versus memory versus clock speeds.

Where a GeForce 8800 GTS has 96 shader cores and a 8600 GT has 32 (which already is too little) the 8500GT has 16 stream processors. Much like it's bigger 8600 brother, the 8500 has to deal with it's memory bandwidth over a 128-bit memory bus.

As you can see from the specifications, the 8500 GT really is a castrated GeForce 8600 GT and performance will show that clearly.

Reference Specifications

Chipset - NVIDIA Geforce 8500 GT
Memory - 256MB GDDR2
Core Frequency - 450 MHz
Memory Frequency - 400 (x2) MHz
RAMDAC - 400MHZ
Interface - PCI-Express
Memory Bus - 128-bit
Max. Resolution - 2560 x 1600
SLI Ready - No
Stream Processors - 16
Output - #1. Dual-Link DVI #2. HDTV s

Please notice that only the 8600 GTS will have HDCP support straight out of the box, the 8500 GT and 8600 GT do not.

ECS GeForce 8500 GT 512MB

Inside the colorful and stylish box (with apparently a dragon fighting theme) we find a lovely blue colored graphics card with bundled a manual, driver CD and SVIDEO cable. Honestly... that's it. Well, we are moving in the budget market here so that's okay I guess.

The card itself will make up for a lot as we'll show you later on.

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