In the 3D Mark benchmark the clear winner are cards based on the 8600 GTS. They hold a visible advantage over cards based on the 8600 GTS and the 8500 GT. The ASUS 8600 GTS
outperforms all of the cards in its class, largely because of its 745 MHz GPU clock. The standard GPU frequency of the NVIDIA 8600 GTS 675 MHz. The performance difference between the highest performing 8600 GTS and GT card is 10%.

Shadermark emphasizes that the 8500 GT has much weaker performance than other tested card models. This can be seen in the line graph where the 8500 GT solution stands quite alone. For the most part, all other cards remain in relatively the same score range.