Out of the many new parts that NVIDIA recently released, consumers have paid particular attention to the company's new line of mainstream graphics cards. Although NVIDIA officially released these cards last month on the 17th, there was so much going on at the time in terms of product releases that we weren't able to give the cards as much attention as we would have liked. Taking this into consideration, we have decided to revisit the GeForce 8 mainstream video cards and see the current state of the market.

The launch of the NVIDIA mainstream cards last month wasn't met with the same enthusiasm shown towards the GeForce 8800 when it launched back in November. Expectations were high for the new midrange cards and many expected them to show similar performance levels, naturally scaled down to fit the price range, as the GeForce 8800. The performance of the new cards, however, ended up being considerably lower than expected and thus many viewed the newcomers as poor performers.

Many also feel that the technical characteristics of the new cards are inadequate for the mainstream market segment. The 128bit memory bus seems rather small compared to the 384 bit bus width the 8800 GTX comes with or even the 320 bit bus of the 8800 GTS. The amount of stream processors, though, falls victim to the largest criticism. The GeForce 8600 line of cards only comes with 32 stream processors. Comparatively, this is a humble amount when looking at the 128 stream processors of the GeForce 8800 GTX and the 96 of the GeForce 8800 GTS. In truth, much of this criticism brings up some valid points, and we'll revisit them in the conclusion of this article.

In this roundup we will be analyzing 10 mainstream cards that are based on the NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS, 8600 GT, or 8500 architecture from six different manufacturers. Below is a table of the solutions we are taking a look at:

The ASUS GeForce 8600 GTS has the highest operating frequency of the 10 cards we are analyzing. The Gainward GeForce 8500 GT Gold Edition comes with the lowest overall clock speeds, the deciding factor being memory frequency. In addition, the Gainward GeForce 8500 GT is the only video card in the article that uses DDR2 memory.