In the event that you took a wild guess about the position of GeForce 8500GT in Nvidia's 8000 series of graphics chips, you'd probably guess it lies in the middle - and you'd be correct, but only up to a point.

At the top of this particular tree are the superb 8800 GTX and 8800 Ultra which use 128 unified stream processors that are the key components in a DirectX 10 graphics chip. These stream processors run at speeds up to 1,500MHz while the rest of the core clock hammers away around 600MHz and memory, connected via a 384-bit memory controller, hums at 2GHz.

The performance of these chips is epic and so too is the price. Just below them in the league table we have the 8800 GTS with 96 stream processors that run on reduced clock speeds with a 320-bit memory controller, to deliver about three quarters of the performance of the GTX.

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Moving down the pecking order we have the 8600 GT and GTS with 32 stream processors. The 8600 GTS uses high clock speeds and is one quarter of the 8800 GTX, while the slower 8600 GT is about one fifth of a GTX.

With us so far?

Now we come to this ECS 8500 GT with 16 stream processors running at 900MHz, a core speed of 500MHz and 256MB of DDR2 that runs at an effective speed of 860MHz, and the same 128-bit memory controller as the 8600 models. The ECS has less than ten percent of the graphics power of the GeForce 8800 GTX, so clearly it's at the bottom of the Nvidia product range.

Well, no.

The GeForce 8400 GS has the same hardware as the 8500 GT but the memory controller is a pathetic 64-bits wide and then there's the OEM 8300 GS which has a mere eight stream processors.

So we've got the 8800, 8600, 8500, 8400 and 8300 and, as the 8500 is plumb in the middle it is, by definition, mid-range. However, the performance is quite feeble.

We tested the ECS card in a Windows XP PC running DirectX 9.0c and found that it was possible to play intensive games such as Far Cry, FEAR and Half-Life 2, but the frame rates were fairly dire when we enabled high quality settings. In an ideal world we'd test a DirectX 10 graphics card using Windows Vista with DirectX 10 games but at present there are no suitable games on the market.

The problem is that when DirectX 10 games such as Crysis are released later this year you can be quite confident that graphics cards such as this ECS will be utterly inadequate.

That's more of a discussion of the GeForce 8500 GT chip rather than the ECS N8500GT-256DY, but the reason is simple; the ECS is a straight reference design that uses a small, relatively noisy cooler and the only extra in the package besides the driver CD is an S-Video cable. To make matters even less exciting, the ECS won't overclock one jot so there is nothing extra waiting to be unlocked.

Although the GeForce 8500 GT supports DirectX 10, it isn't much cop for gaming and therefore offers little incentive to upgrade your existing low-end graphics card. Should you be looking for suitable graphics power to run the Windows Vista Aero interface, the ECS would be rather expensive, purely because Nvidia charges so much for its chips. No, the ATi HD 2400 XT would do equally as well and for rather less money.