Point Of View 8600GT, 8500GT
Author: Luka Rakamaric
Date: 26 Apr 2007

In the days following the recent launch of the NVIDIA?s series 8 midrange lineup, the stronger cards, especially 8600GTS, got all the attention. Their smaller brother, the 8500GT was cast aside, although we are sure that it will sell more units than both of the 8600 put together.
Unlike the 8600 series, the 8500GT uses a different core called G86. It?s a little smaller than the G84 used in the 8600 series, 210 compared to 289 million transistors. The difference, of course, went to the reduced number of stream processors, down from 32 to 16. The number of ROP?s has also been reduced from 8 to 4. This, in theory, should make the 8500GT a borderline mainstream product, leaning heavily into the low end, because a theoretical drop of 50% in performance when compared to the 8600GT cannot be called mainstream. In fact, we learned that there will no longer be a x300 or x400 series in retail, so the 8500GT actually assumes the role of 7300GT from the previous generation. When looked from that angle, because 7300GT was a low end part, the specifications of 8500GT don?t look that bad. The core clock is 450MHz, and the DDR2 memory operates at 400 MHz. Shaders are clocked at 900MHz. NVIDIA will introduce 8400 and 8300 series, but only for OEM manufacturers and they will in fact be using the same chip, the G84, only with lower clocks, or less memory, or even run on a 64 bit wide memory controller.