XFX GeForce 8500 GT Review

[MikeC]

For the casual gamer, the XFX GeForce 8500 GT may fit the bill with a sub-$100 price tag. Although today is Father's day, Jonathan Martini recently picked out the card for his mother's system, which is powered by a 3.6GHz Pentium 4 "Prescott" CPU. Based on the benchmark results, game performance appears to be optimal at a resolution of 1024x768 with the possibility of applying 2x AA depending on the title.

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/xfx_geforce_8500gt/images/card_front_s.jpg

The XFX GeForce 8500 GT is DirectX 10 ready and fully capable of powering Vista's new graphical features. PureVideo2 support adds full decode capabilities for HD content and features HDCP capabilities, Dual-Link DVI support for resolutions up to 2560x1600, and an awesome double lifetime warranty.

Check the review out here - http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/xfx_geforce_8500gt/index.shtml

[OliverRedfox]

It faired better in gaming then I thought it would. It is a shame the purevideo wasn't tested, since I think that is the real killer feature of this card. With a fanless model of the 8500gt and full HD video offloading, it seems like a perfect card for a silent HTPC. You might want to note that it only uses 40w of power (43w for the 8600gt) which makes it much lower then previous generation graphic cards.

[JonathanM]

I agree. I was looking forward to testing purevideo as well. It's mid-June and NVIDIA has yet to launch any driver updates to provide the PureVideo capabilities in June as per the FAQ.

Hopefully, NVIDIA will have released something in time for an upcoming article otherwise we may have to go back and investigate this afterwards.

[Starscream]

From page 3 of the review:

"Intel Pentium 5 560 (3.6 GHz) Processor"

http://www.nvnews.net/reviews/xfx_geforce_8500gt/page_3.shtml

Where can I get one of those? :p

[JonathanM]

Thanks for pointing that out that typo.

The review has been corrected. Stupid spell check... Oh wait... That's my fault ;)