Published in Reviews

Zotac Geforce 8500GT SLI vs 8600GT

by on11 June 2007

Index

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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.

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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. Image

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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

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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

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

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
complex

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

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

8500GT referenc 450/800 MHz

2291

 

 

 

Zotac 8500GT 700/800 MHz

2936

 

 

 

Zotac 8500GT 700/800 MHz SLI

5186

 

 

 

Zotac 8500GT 730/1060 MHz SLI OC

5877

 

 

 

Asus EN8600GT 540/1400MHz

4513

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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