Pros: Good performance for an entry level card, Good Overclocker, DX10 support, Extra power not required.
Cons.: Average OpenGL performance, Limited muscle power.
About:
Nvidia launched their 8-series with a big bang that literally blew away all the competition, from within as well as from the outside. Apart from the new architecture, better performance and video handling capabilities, this series also came with a high price tag; but not anymore.
Aimed at replacing the 7300GT and 7600GS, the GeForce 8500GT is an entry level card that promises a better price to performance ratio than its 7-series counterparts. We put these claims to test and here’s what we got.
Specifications
The Card
Code named G86, the GeForce 8500GT has 16 unified shaders (stream processors) running at 900MHz and a 500 MHz core clock It has a 128-bit memory bus and sports 256 MB of DDR2 RAM that runs at an effective 800MHz.
The card looks almost anorexic with just a simple (and effective) aluminum HSF to show some weight. The card sports a DVI and a VGA port as well as an S-Video port at the back.
Being an 8-series member, the 8500GT provides DX10 support, 16x Anti-aliasing, True HDR, NVIDIA PureVideo, OpenGL 2.0 support and HDCP support. 
One thing to note about this card is that it DOES NOT support hardware SLI mode. It provides software SLI mode with the use of the ForceWare drivers.
Bundle
Galaxy GeForce 8500GT 256 MB graphics card
S-Video Cable
Driver CD
Quick Install Guide (Printed)
User Manual (Printed)
A ‘Powered by Galaxy’ sticker (kinda reminds you of the Intel-AMD wars)
No games or other accessories here. Guess that’s another way of saving on some costs.
Testbench
We used the following configuration to test the Galaxy GeForce 8500GT:
CPU: AMD Athlon 5000+ (AM2, 2 x 2.60 GHz)
Motherboard: ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe
Memory: Kingston Hyper X DDR2 750MHz (743MHz, 4-4-4-12)
HDD: Western Digital Caviar SE 250 GB HDD SATA
Case: ATX Cabinet with Vantec Ion 2 460W PSU
Monitor: Philips 109E5 Monitor (19″, Max Res. 1920 x 1440)
Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP2
Drivers: ForceWare Release 158 Version: 158.22
Analysis
Going by the Synthetic benchmarks, the 8500GT beats the crap out of the two cards from Nvidia 7-series, but the In-game benchmarks tell a different story altogether.
The overall performance of the Galaxy 8500GT is somewhere in between the 7300GT and the 7600GS, more towards the latter in most of the benchmarks. Surprisingly, it showed a noticeable drop in frame rate in the Quake 4 benchmark but it was very much playable at 1024×768 with a bit of AA and AF. Might just be a driver issue.
We did not test the DX10 capabilities of the 8500GT (for now) but will be soon doing a DX10 testing of all 8-series cards in a different article.
Overclocking
The above graph clearly shows the overclocking potential and the performance of the Galaxy 8500GT. The 8500GT jumped from a stock setting of 500/800 MHz (Core/Memory) to 625/1150 MHz (Core/Memory). That’s a jump of 23% for the core and a whopping 43% for the memory.
At stock settings, the 3D Mark 2005 score was 4862 while the score warped to 6036 registering a jump of 24% in the synthetic benchmark performance.
Conclusion
What this card will do is give you DX10 compliance. But if you (like us) are waiting to play Alan Wake and Crysis, I’d suggest you wait for some more time as it is still not known whether these low-end cards will have enough muscle to run these games.
One more thing to note here is that Nvidia has clearly raised the bar for their entry level cards with respect to the last generation of graphic cards they released.
The Galaxy GeForce 8500GT is available for Rs. 5,500/- with a 3-year warranty. For this price you get a card that performs as good as the 7600GS with DX10 support and a great overclocking potential. Now that my friend, is a neat deal.
Review Source: Techtree.com