NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT 256MB

The GeForce 8500GT is NVIDIA's value-priced contender in the GeForce 8 series. The 8500GT has a 450MHz core clock and 400MHz memory clock, but how is this $100 creation able to compete against other graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA? We have our hands on the passively cooled Gigabyte GeForce 8500GT 256MB graphics card and have run our usual Linux graphics tests along with some of our first overclocking attempts with this new solution.

Last week NVIDIA introduced the GeForce 8500 and 8600 series as the midrange DirectX 10 graphics cards to accompany the already existing high-end GeForce 8800 series. This product launch had also resulted in a new Linux beta display driver to append product support for the GeForce 8300GS, 8400GS, 8500GT, 8600GT, and 8600GTS. Now that we have had a few days to investigate these new GeForce 8 graphics cards under Linux, we have our first thoughts to share and in this article it will be on the GeForce 8500GT. The NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT 256MB graphics card represents the $100 graphics card market segment and according to NVIDIA's materials it is designed for both the casual gamer and non-gamer. How does this value-priced PCI Express solution perform up against the current NVIDIA GeForce selection as well the offerings from ATI? We will tell you today in the first gaming benchmarks and overclocking of the 8500GT within Linux.