PNY Verto GeForce 8500GT 512MB Video Card
See it at Amazon.com for $48.99Average Customer Rating
(4.5 out of 5)
Amazon Customer Reviews
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(5 out of 5)Great Card for Price
After much research I chose the card because the price was good and it is fully compatible with VISTA. I play Titan Quest and my onboard Nvidia would only play on the lowest game settings. With this card I can play at the highest settings and with no load on my CPU. This card was a breeze to install as VISTA has drivers built in. You will however want to load the latest drivers from Nvidia.
(5 out of 5)Great Video card for the money
I had a GeForce 6600 and bought Call of Duty 4 The game ran but would freeze after 30+ minutes of play time. The Geforce 6600 was being maxed out buy the call of duty 4 game. I upgraded to The GeForce 8500Gt and the game now runs great no more freezing and the graphics are the best ever. Its not the best card out there but its the best bang for the buck I have no regreats buying this card I almost got the GeForce 8400 gs and it was $20.00 more than I got the 8500 Gt for thru amazon. Amazon rocks they have some of the best deals around.
(5 out of 5)Great card!
Hey, for around $100 you can't go wrong with this card. It's not a top of the line card, but it does alot of things really really well. It improved the graphics on alot of my games and i didn't even change any of the settings. You can't go wrong with this Directx 10 compatible card!
(3 out of 5)Not good for BD playback...yet.
I bought this board a week ago. I spent almost three days researching for an affordable H.264 hardware decoder graphic board to play a Blu-Ray disc (BD). I have a Vaio desktop VGC-RC310G that comes with a Blu-Ray disk drive. Unfortunately, Sony packed a GeForce 7600GT graphic board (TurboCache??? Come on, Sony...) that doesn't have hardware decoding for H.264. So, it does play slow, not good at all to watch a movie. The nVidia sells a "PureVideo Technology" software that is supposed to "release partially" the hardware decoding on Series 7 of nVidia's boards. I downloaded the trial version and it didn't make any difference. I checked the numbers at the Windows processor performance meter and it was all the way close to 100% of processor usage when playing BD.
I ran WinDVD to play the BD-movie and... it didn't. The options for hardware acceleration were there (color and graphic), available at WinDVD. However, every time I reached the DVD main menu, an error message popped-up saying "WinDVD MFC... error". After clicking "OK", WinDVD closed. I took the disc out of the driver, changed WinDVD setup to disable the hardware acceleration. Put the disc back and I was able to watch the movie... slow, as before.
I couldn't believe that. I browsed the Internet looking for information about the WinDVD MFC error and, in the end, I was at nVidia website. At the link saying about the features of a "perfect" HD-DVD or BD-DVD player computer, I was shocked when I read that GeForce 8500 and 8600 are not supported (yet) by WinDVD. The only option available was an specific version of the PowerDVD, from Cyberlink. So, the hardware acceleration feature of my 8500GT is useless, unless I am willing to spend another 100 dollars buying a new software.
I wanted to tell you, guys, this saga just to help others to not fall into this BD-DVD thing. At least not right now. I feel myself like when I bought my first laptop with a DVD drive. I couldn't play a DVD movie there since my hardware (that is, my graphic board) didn't have any support for video playback. It's awful that we, costumers, are carried out to believe that something in the market (BD-DVD playback) works, when actually it does not. Unless you have 600 dollars to spend in a "muscle card" like 8800's boards.
So, if you want to play BD-DVD in your computer for a reasonal price, forget it. It's not ready yet. As that Kurosawa's character says "MADADAYO"...
(4 out of 5)simple instillation
I was looking for a quality video card to drive my new 22" widescreen monitor and render graphics for pc video games. This card performs well and does not require extra power supply - it simply plugs into the PCIe slot and configures easily with the supplied software.