Which is better?

[beanhead07]

Hey guys, I just built a new gaming PC and I need to get a video card. I'm on a kinda tight budget and can't really spend much more than $100. I'm not a die-hard gamer and don't need the games played on all the highest settings, but I was wondering out of these two cards, which one would be better? I was looking at either an NVidia GeForce 8500GT 512 MB or an NVidia GeForce 8600GT 256 MB?

My computer specs are:

2.8GHz Pentium 4
4 GB DDR2 RAM
500GB Hard Drive
500W PSU

And it is PCI Express so I was just wondering which of those two cards would be best. I want to play games like Crysis, maybe COD4, and some older games. Like I said I don't need them to run on the highest settings but just playable. Thanks guys!

[fpsmitch]

you definitely wan the 8600...
i have one, and it is awesome, not the higfhest settings but still ok.
much better than the 8500

[beanhead07]

Cool. Thanks!

[Calum]

I agree, the 8500 is a very bad card.
However, the 8600 will not run Crysis very well (no card does to be honest) as it's not very powerful.

[beanhead07]

Thanks Calum. Yeah my old PC ran Crysis ok on pretty low settings so I at least got a feel for the game. I will probably go with the 8600 and eventually I will get another one to run SLI. Thanks for the input guys!