Review: Zotac 8500GT twins in action
Today for the first time we are showing results of two Geforce 8500GT cards in SLI. The Geforce 8500 GT is the cheapest card in Nvidia's DirectX 10 series of products so far and it will be interesting to see the performance of these cards in SLI. The Geforce 8500 GT cards are clocked at 450 MHz for the core and 800 MHz for the memory. However, we tested Zotac's 8500GT cards which are clocked at 700MHz, way higher than the reference board, while the memory is clocked at the reference speed of 800MHz.
Aside from the factory OC-ed core, the main feature of Zotac's 8500 GT card is its 128-bit memory bus with 12.8GB/s of bandwidth and 16 Stream Processors. You can check out a detailed description of it here in our review of the card. 
Zotac bundles one DVI to HDMI dongle in the box. Besides that you can get an S-Video and component video cable and a drivers CD.
Test Bed
Motherboard:
Nforce 680i EVGA board (supplied by EVGA)
CPU:
Intel Core 2 Duo 6800 Extreme Edition (supplied by Intel)
CPU Cooler:
Akasa EVO AK 922 Blue cooler for Athlon 64/X2/FX and Intel CPU's (supplied by Akasa)
Memory:
OCZ Reaper PC2-8500 1,066MHz 5-5-5-15 (supplied by OCZ)
CL5-5-5-15-CR2T at 2.3V
Graphics Card:
Zotac Geforce 8500GT (supplied by Zotac)
Zotac Geforce 8500GT (supplied by Zotac)
Gainward BLISS 8500GT Golden Sample PCX (supplied by Gainward)
Asus EN8600GT (supplied by Asus)PSU:
OCZ GameXStream 700W (supplied by OCZ)
Hard Drive:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500GB SATA (supplied by Seagate)
Testing
A single Zotac 8500GT card should be enough for the average Windows XP or Vista user. You can enjoy Vista, watch HD videos and even play some games at lower resolutions. Nevertheless, we wanted to know if two of these cards could get us some playable FPS in higher resolutions, and if it's worth to eventually buy another one and go SLI. We compared Zotac's 8500 GT SLI siblings with an Asus 8600GT card which costs more than one 8500GT, but less than two of them.
3DMarks
|
Composite Figures 3Dmark 03 |
3DMark 03 |
Game2 |
Game3 |
Game4 |
|
8500GT referenc 450/800 MHz |
8328 |
61.4 |
51.0 |
48.4 |
|
Zotac 8500GT 700/800 MHz |
10251 |
72.0 |
61.9 |
66.4 |
|
Zotac 8500GT 700/800 MHz SLI |
15032 |
119.5 |
96.5 |
96.8 |
|
Asus EN8600GT 540/1400MHz |
15247 |
105.5 |
88.7 |
107.0 |
|
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Composite Figures 3Dmark 03 |
Single Texturinng |
Multi Textur. |
Vertex Shader |
Pixel Shader 2.0 |
|
8500GT referenc 450/800 MHz |
1324.4 |
2885.5 |
29.0 |
112.8 |
|
Zotac 8500GT 700/800 MHz |
1328.1 |
3988.9 |
38.3 |
127.9 |
|
Zotac 8500GT 700/800 MHz SLI |
2561.5 |
6910.5 |
53.6 |
204.3 |
|
Asus EN8600GT 540/1400MHz |
2023.7 |
7028.5 |
55.1 |
168.2 |
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The two Zotac 8500GT cards scored 15,032 points in 3DMark 03 which is 46% higher than a single Zotac 8500GT. If we compare SLI results with the reference 8500GT card that got 8,328 points, we can see an 80 per cent performance boost. Nevertheless, "double the fun" with Zotac 8500GT SLI is not enough to win against a single 8600GT which, as we said before, costs less than two of these.
|
Composite Figures 3Dmark 05 |
3DMark 05 |
Game1 |
Game2 |
Game3 |
|
8500GT referenc 450/800 MHz |
4725 |
22.5 |
14.4 |
20.9 |
|
Zotac 8500GT 700/800 MHz |
6125 |
28.8 |
19.1 |
27.2 |
|
Zotac 8500GT 700/800 MHz SLI |
10628 |
46.2 |
34.6 |
48.1 |
|
Asus EN8600GT 540/1400MHz |
8924 |
38.5 |
28.7 |
41.2 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Composite Figures 3Dmark 05 |
Single Texturinng |
Multi Textur. |
Pixel Shader |
VS/VS |
|
8500GT referenc 450/800 MHz |
1464.0 |
3007.3 |
62.3 |
54.0/53.0 |
|
Zotac 8500GT 700/800 MHz |
1442.3 |
5347.8 |
83.7 |
54.0/59.9 |
|
Zotac 8500GT 700/800 MHz SLI |
2768.9 |
8835.6 |
144.8 |
106.0/115.3 |
|
Asus EN8600GT 540/1400MHz |
2166.7 |
7399.2 |
140.1 |
63.0/95.1 |
|
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3DMark 05 managed to utilize the additional power of a second Geforce 8500GT, so the SLI system gets a win with 10,628 points. The Geforce 8500GT SLI system is 19 per cent better than the 8600GT and 73 per cent better than a single Zotac Geforce 8500GT card. In any case, the reference 8500GT card, with its 4,725 marks can't be compared with Zotac's 8500GT SLI, it is 124 per cent slower or 5,903 marks.
|
Composite Figures 3Dmark 06 |
3DMark 06 |
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8500GT referenc 450/800 MHz |
2291 |
|
|
|
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Zotac 8500GT 700/800 MHz |
2936 |
|
|
|
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Zotac 8500GT 700/800 MHz SLI |
5186 |
|
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|
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Zotac 8500GT 730/1060 MHz SLI OC |
5877 |
|
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|
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Asus EN8600GT 540/1400MHz |
4513 |
|
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|
SM2.0 Test |
Score |
GT1 |
GT2 |
|
|
8500GT referenc 450/800 MHz |
878 |
6.913 |
7.726 |
|
|
Zotac 8500GT 700/800 MHz |
1158 |
9.279 |
10.015 |
|
|
Zotac 8500GT 700/800 MHz SLI |
2171 |
17.183 |
19.007 |
Last modified on 12 June 2007
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