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.

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.

GeForce 8500GT

GeForce 8600GT

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.

Average user rating