Conclusive thoughts

Before we draw any conclusions let me tell you that this product is in fact a limited edition for BestBuy.com only, you won't find this card anywhere else, neither in online shops, neither on XFX's products list. None the less, that does not affect our way of testing and benchmarking, we reviewed the Fatal1ty 8500 GT like we would have done with any other video card.

The Fatal1ty 8500GT is in real life far from ordinary, its looks matches those of XFX's normal passive 8500 GT (PV-T86J-UAHG) and with clock speeds increase of only ~10% it is far from superior either.



Our game tests reflects how the increased clocks make the Fatal1ty GT a bit faster than reference 8500 GT's with DDR2 ram, nearly 10% increased frame rate which is far from noticeable. That did leave us with a nice margin to play around with, our sample overclocked very well considering its cooling system and we obtained nearly 50% speed increases compared to reference clocked GT's! The gap could have been even greater, with UT2007 and Battlefield 2 the engine is the limit, not the GPU. Another negative point is the 512MB DDR2 RAM. I agree, more is better, but the 8500 GPU is not really fast enough to render the image details which requires more then 256MB RAM, the extra memory makes it worse in fact because you'll probably have to pay more for the same performance level.

The passive cooled heatsink is a bonus though, together with the on-board digital sound plug those are the only real goodies we could find with this product. Price wise you can count on paying quite a bit extra for this 'limited edition': up to $ 149.99 where the normal XFX 8500 GT is being sold for $ 89.99, for me that just doesn't weight up. Searching around you might find even better prices products, but for once I really would like to mention the Calibre branded P850+HM which is clocked at nearly the same specs as we could get via overclocking. Besides that, it also comes with GDDR3 DRAM, so if you think you buy a professional gaming card with this Fatal1ty 8500 GT, please think twice as you can find much better performing GT's around for less high prices.

In the end, I think we can say conclude that this card is not what the gamers are looking for, but it would do fine for HTPC users if XFX could add that DVI-to-HDMI converter, and off course lower the retail price.

+ Slightly increased performance
+ Noiseless
+ SPDIF plug -> HDMI ready
+ Overclocking headroom


- Very high price: $ 149.99
- Low availability
- Relabeled, no special card design
- No DVI->HDMI converter included



I would like to thank XFX for allowing us to test their latest Fatal1ty product.