Gigabyte 8500GT TurboForce (GV-NX85T256HP)

INTRODUCTION

At a recent briefing for AMD’s latest entry and mid-range cards, the HD2400 and HD2600, I was told an interesting little tidbit that AMD had found out. It turns out that a lot of the customers buying their previous entry-level cards, the X1300, had bought it mainly for playing games. Even AMD was surprised that people would first spend as little as possible on the video card and then buy games each month for 50-100$ instead of buying a few less games and put the saved money on a faster card . It probably is not as strange as it sounds though. We have all seen all those “gaming computers” that are being sold with slow X1300, NVIDIA 7300LE cards or even (shudder) on-board video. How should Joe Average know what is a good gaming card or not?

This is where we come in. Reviews like this are meant to tell you what a card is good at and what it isn’t good at. So let me start this review by telling you that if your main objective with your planned new video card is to play games – you probably should spend a bit more cash on another card, something like the 8600GT or the HD2600XT. When it comes to gaming this card is meant as an upgrade to on-board graphics. Luckily it has some other nice tricks up its sleeve making it an interesting card for HTPC-builders.

ABOUT GIGABYTE

Gigabyte was started as a motherboard technology research laboratory over 20 years ago. Since then they have not only started to sell motherboards but also video cards, notebooks, mice, network products and a lot more other stuff.