| Article Index |
|---|
| GeForce 8500GT and 8600GT Video Cards Performance Review |
| Page 2 - The Test Setup |
| Page 3 - 3DMark06 Results |
| Page 5 - Prey Results |
| Page 6 - Conclusion |
| All Pages |
nVidia have released
a new range of cards to come in under the 8800 series juggernauts, the 8500 and 8600 GT series. Today at OzHardware we get to test them out and see how they compare to a similar priced nVidia card, the 7900GS.
Now, the first point to note is that these cards are in no way comparable to the 8800GTS and GTX series of video cards in terms of performance, these cards are made for the more budget conscious gamer who still wants DirectX10 support that the 8000 series of graphics processors offers.
Starting at just AU$135 for the 8500GT and AU$205 for the 8600GT - they are way less than half the price of even the cheapest GeForce 8800GTS models and when you look at the performance specifications it’s easy to see why. The table below shows the basic differences between the different models of 8000 series graphic cards, as well as a GeForce 7900GS which we will be using a comparison card today due to it being in the same price range.
| 8800GTS | 8600GT | 8500GT | 7900GS | |
| Stream Processors | 96 | 32 | 16 | N/A |
| Core Clock (MHz) | 500 | 540 | 450 | 450 |
| Memory Clock | 800 | 700 | 400 | 660 |
| Memory Size | 640/320MB | 256MB GDDR3 | 256MB DDR2 | 256MB GDDR3 |
| Memory Interface Width | 320-Bit | 128-Bit | 128-Bit | 256-Bit |
| Memory Bandwidth (GB/s) | 64 | 22.4 | 12.8 | 42.2 |
| Texture Fill Rate (Billion/s) | 24 | 10.8 | 3.6 | 9 |
As you can see from the above table, the 8600 and 8500 have had their memory interface severely restricted compared to the 8800 and even the older 7900GS series cards, which in turn means much lower available memory bandwidth and a much lower fill rate capacity, which will greatly impair performance especially in higher resolutions. As we already know these newcomers aren’t going to be a match for the big guns, this test is more about finding the best “Bang for Your Buck” performance, as the prices being asked for the 8500 and 8600 series are very reasonable indeed.
When you first look at the 8500 and 8600 cards, you aren’t met with a gigantic fan/heatsink configuration but instead a very modest single cooling fan on a small heatsink, which did get me a little worried about their performance potential, but I never judge a book by its cover. Notice that no additional power connector is required for either card like many current model performance cards.
Both the 8500 and 8600 series are listed as SLI compatible by nVidia, but with our cards, which are Innovision “Inno3D” brand, only the 8600GT has the SLI connector present. Today we’re only looking at single card performance, and for both the 8500 and 8600 cards we’ll mildly overclock them to see the true performance potential of these cards while still remaining 100% stable, after all who’s going to deny a free performance upgrade.
The Test Machine:
- Intel Pentium Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU
- Abit A9WD i975X Motherboard
- 2GB Corsair Twin2X PC2-8500 DDR RAM
- Western Digital 250GB Serial ATA-II-300 HDD
- Antec Basiq 500W ATX PSU
- Windows XP SP2
We will be running our tests on Futuremark’s 3DMark06 benchmarking program, as well as popular First Person Shooter games Quake 4 and Prey.
The Results:
Firstly, we have 3DMark06:
We can see from these results we can see that compared to 7900GS, the 8600GT has only a slight performance advantage when running at standard speed, with the 8500GT having less than half the performance of its big brother. Both cards did fairly well when running 8x Anti-Aliasing, only dropping performance by around 40% which is good considering the amount of extra work the GPUs are undertaking.
Both showed a marked improvement when overclocked. The standard running speeds of the 8600 are 540Mhz Core speed, and 700Mhz Memory speed, upping these to 640/850Mhz respectively showed around a 16% improvement in the 3DMark score. The 8500GT (450/400Mhz normal, upped to 515/460Mhz) showed an improvement of around 12%. These overclocked speeds are not pushing the cards to their limit, but rather a modest increase that will still give 100% stability and can be done with standard cooling. With some serious tweaking and additional cooling capacity installed, there’s no doubt both these cards could be pushed quite a bit further.
Next we test out Quake 4.
{mospagebreak title=Page 4 - Quake 4 Results}
Quake 4 Results.
Our Quake 4 tests were run on a custom timedemo at 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 resolutions. Each test is run 3 times to ensure consistent results just in case windows decides to do something in the background and mess up a result. VSync is forced OFF for all our tests.
The Quake 4 results show that the higher range cards, the 7900 and 8600 seem to be limited by CPU speed as they max out at an average of 69/70fps in the lower resolutions, but the 7900GS handles higher resolutions much better than the supposedly higher spec 8600GT, even when overclocked the 8600GT can’t keep up with a standard 7900GS.
The 8500GT gives very acceptable performance for its price, you’d be able to play your game at an average resolution without a problem, but try any higher resolutions and parts of the game are bound to chug along, even when overclocked.
Onto our final benchmark test – Prey.
The Prey tests we run at the same resolutions as the Quake 4 benchmark, and all tests run 3 times for consistency.
Again we see a similar result, both cards showing a reasonable improvement when overclocked, but the standard 7900GS is still faster than even the overclocked 8600GT. The 8500GT obviously lags behind the other two cards significantly, but at an average and still useable resolutions it performs adequately enough to play the game smoothly.
Conclusion:
If you need DirectX10 support, then these cards should be strongly considered, they are good value for money and reasonable bang for your buck performance. It will be interesting to see how these cards perform when some DirectX10 games or applications are finally released. If you don’t require DirectX10 support, then there are older but still faster cards out there for around the same money, so take that into consideration when making your choice.
These products can be purchased online at www.techbuy.com.au (Direct Link)
