Page 11 (Conclusion)

The Verdict ..

Now hear me out. You can pickup this card in it's 512MB flavor for roughly 80-90 bucks (USD). Now if you are a pure-bred gamer... I just can't recommend it to you. Honestly, it's fun to have a DX10 compatible card, yet with 16 shader cores you just can't achieve much performance. An exactly similar priced 256MB Radeon HD 2600 XT will cost the same yet offer better performance in any scenario plus it'll offer full HD decoding.

If we flip it the other way around, then I must say... this card offers a lot of such a small amount of money. You have all the nifty features an GeForce series 8 card has. We did connect it to a 30"LCD at 2560x1600 and it did work perfectly. It is a fine card for Windows Vista Aero and yes... if you stick at 1024x768, forget about antialiasing, then you actually can play a good number of games pretty well.

Now we didn't give out much performance results on Purevideo HD as we haven't finalized everything just yet (we're working on a new HD decoding article) but here the card flunks. It surely can hardware accelerate (decode) VC-1 and h.264 just fine but there are two key factors a big issue. The first is that the card lacks enough horsepower for it to properly post-process on HD image quality. HQV-HD (a HD benchmark test) scores significant lower at roughly 45 points where a 8600 GT scores a nearly perfect 100 points.

The second reason I don't see this is a good HD decoding card is even more simple... to decode Blu-Ray or HD-DVD on a HD screen... you need HDCP decoding. and the card does not have that ability. Right now not a lot of titles have HDCP content protection enabled, yet in the near future it will.

So to sum things up; this card is really fun for the money. Don't expect miracles in games though as performance is on par with what you can expect for this kind of money. Overclocking however will help, this card can achieve up-to 30% better overall performance thanks to the ability of it's massive overclock. It's a really fun card for generic PC usage, just don't game on it too much. Personally, I'd throw in a few tenners more and enter the mid-range market as there's much more to gain performance wise.

ECS did a really fine job with this card though, performance as expected, good quality build, great overclocking potential and all that at a fair price. These are the four key items that you need to keep in mind if you are in the market for a budget graphics card and plan nothing else to do than generic desktop usage and play an older game every once in a while.

Thanks to ECS for sending us this product.

ECS GeForce 8500 GT 512MB
Info: ECSPrice: 89 USD / 70 EUR