The Card

Moving to the card itself we have what looks like a low-end video card. Crazy! I know! At this point you have to feel pretty confident that you're dealing with a low-end video card and not some magical "Decoder Card."

What's annoying is that with the card being marketed towards the home theatre segment an active cooling solution was used on the card. There's nothing more us HT guys like than a silent HTPC.

On that note, generally speaking the smaller the fan the more annoying it's going to sound. Fortunately this is something we will look at later in the review, let's hope it doesn't disappoint.

Across the bottom of the card we have our two prongs where the extra cable that was in the package sits. It goes from here to either your sound card or a place on your motherboard where your sound chip is more than likely sitting. You would have to refer to your manual to find the exact location.

Like we've mentioned already, we have a HDMI port located on the I/O panel. Apart from this we have a Dual-Link DVI port and a standard TV-Out port.

Getting down to the real information, we ultimately have here an 8500GT with a HDMI port. The card comes with 256MB of GDDR3 memory on a 128-bit bus and carries with it a clock speed of 1600MHz DDR. The core comes in at a low 400MHz which is standard for an 8500GT.