This card is the same card as the Bravura Evil Master II, but without the retail extras thrown in. The card itself is a fairly plain-looking affair - a simple green PCB (printed circuit board) with a small cooling fan and heatsink over the GPU, and an array of RAM modules absent of the large RAM heatsinks now commonplace on the NVIDIA models.

Although ATI has not challenged NVIDIA on the cosmetic front, the Labs team was impressed by the fantastic depth of colour and clarity of image that the Radeon cards are capable of - theyre definitely ahead of the GeForce3 cards in this regard.

The Radeon 8500 has the potential to match and even outperform the GeForce3 Ti 500 across the board, and in our testing both 8500s can be seen jostling among them in most of the tests. If ATI want to harness this potential and take it further, serious attention needs to be paid to its drivers. Driver development is something NVIDIA has down to a fine art.

Testing in 3DMark2001 Pro yielded a few screen artefacts in what seemed to be problems with z-buffering, where occluded objects in a scene appeared in the foreground. These cards are capable of more, given a refinement of drivers.