If you decide to get two Zotac 8500GT cards, gameplay will significantly improve when compared to a single card.  In the first part of the test, without filters, we can see an almost 50 per cent frame rate increase compared to using a single Zotac 8500GT. With two 8500GT's in SLI you can even play at 2,048x1,536 as the cards can deliver 26 FPS in this resolution.

When we turn on Antialiasing and Aniso filtering we get an even higher difference. At 1,600x1,200 we get 61 per cent higher results than with a single card, but with just 21 FPS, FEAR is still not playable.

If you lower the resolution to 1,280x1,024, SLI will give you 32 FPS which is even higher than the 8600GT's 30FPS. An improvement of 60 per cent can be seen at 1,024x768 resolution where SLI gets 53 FPS against 33 FPS for the single card.

In this game we can see the see the increasing gain in the results with higher resolutions and filtering. At 1,024x768 the SLI setup manages 48.7 FPS or 50 per cent higher than the 32.3 FPS of a single card. 

1,600x1,200 is not a problem for two 8500GT's in SLI as they score 26.7 FPS's, or 62 per cent higher than a single card, on which we couldn't get a playable FPS. With Antialiasing and Aniso filtering enabled at 1,600x1,200, SLI gives an almost the identical result. We can see a playable 25.2 FPS, which is 10 FPS or 78 per cent higher than with a single card.
Two Zotac 8500GT cards are just a little better than a single Geforce 8600GT.

In these two games we can see that SLI with two Geforce 8500 GT's puts up a good fight against a single 8600 GT, and it is even winning in some cases.

The next results, from Quake 4 and Lost Planet, are very disappointing. SLI just wouldn't work. We can get over Lost Planet, since the game is not out yet and game play should improve with new drivers, but we can't get over the fact that we were unable to run Quake 4 in SLI.

We tried two up to date Forceware drivers, version 158.27 and 160.02, but SLI wasn't cooperative. Until we manage to find a solution you can check out the single Zotac 8500GT results.

The Zotac Geforce 8500GT will be fast enough to play Quake 4 at resolutions up to 1,600x1,200. If you turn on Antialiasing and Aniso Filtering, and still wish to play in high resolutions, you’ll have to increase the card’s speed or lower your resolution to at least 1,280x1,024.

The overclocked card gives a performance increase of 33 per cent at 2,048x1,536 , which is in this case is useless since the result is still just 16FPS, and that’s not nearly enough for playing the game. A much better result is the 25 per cent increase (8FPS) at 1,280x1,024 which would make gaming much better. Unfortunately the Geforce 8500GT in SLI will not work with Quake 4 and the current driver.

And finally Lost Planet, a game that should be out soon. Drivers are yet to be completed, so the gameplay could be better when compared to our current results.

For the test, we turned on the Motion Blur Quality effect and set to Low, while the effect quality was set to High. This, of course, greatly affects the card’s performance. When we turned them off game play gets better and here are the results in different settings.

Anti-alias = NONE; HDR = Medium; Texture Filter = ANISOTROPIC 4x; Texture Resolution = Medium; Model Quality = High; Shadow Quality = Low; Shadow Resolution = DEFAULT; Motion Blur Quality = None; Effect Resolution = High; Effect Quality = Low; Effect Volume = Low; Lighting Quality = Medium;

We can see that with minimal settings we can get an even higher FPS, but SLI doesn't work here either.

Conclusion

Today we wanted to see how a low budget SLI with two overclocked 8500GT cards performs. Zotac's Geforce 8500GT is a cheap DirectX 10 card ant it's a nice offer when you consider the factory overclock on the core. The card costs around €80 and the 8500 series are the cheapest DirectX 10 card on the market at the moment.

We saw that the performance of two 8500GT cards in SLI is not that much better than a single Geforce 8600GT, which costs around €120.

Since two Geforce 8500GT's cost around €160 we can only recommend this solution if you are using multiple monitors. If you just want a cheap DirectX 10 card to watch HD or play games at lower resolutions, then we can certainly recommend the Zotac Geforce 8500GT.

If you are gamer and want decent performance for your favorite games, then a Geforce 8600GT will be the better choice, since it's cheaper than two Geforce 8500GT cards.