| 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 |
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.
