Gainward has an overclocked version of the Geforce 8500 GT and the overclocked card still costs under €100. The cheapest one we could find costs €94.5 at a German etailer. The default Nvidia card is clocked at 450 MHz core and 800 MHz for the DDR2 memory. It is based on the G86-300 chip and this is the first time we've seen one.
The Gainward BLISS Geforce 8500 GT Golden Sample works has a core clock speed of 600MHz and the GDDR3 memory is clocked at 1400MHz. It really performs great for such a cheap card. This is the second 8500GT card on market with GDDR3 memory, all other cards comes with DDR2. We will just give you some basic scores. This overclocked card is close to the performance of the 7600 GT which is a great achievement for a sub €100 DirectX 10 card.
Gainward's overclocked card scores 11,200 in 3Dmark03, 6,300 in 3Dmark05 and 3,100 in 3Dmark06. In one of the games we tried, Serious Sam 2, it scores 76 fps at 1600x1200 and most games are really playable at 1280x1024. The card itself has a nice and quiet cooler that does the job well.
We haven’t tried to overclock this card any further, but we will.
This is the first DirectX 10 under €/$ 100 and we believe that Gainward´s Bliss 8500 GT GS card is way faster than any other 8500 GT card on market. They don't call them Golden Sample for nothing. Stay tuned for a complete review. Until then enjoy the pictures.