I'm a 50 yr old newb so some one pls tell me what kind of a hit will I take installing the 8500 with core of 450 mem of 800 while the 1650 core is 590 mem 1380 I know the 8500 is direct 10X what will I loose. help, the card was a gift from a close family member. Both of course are PCIe.

my system : AMD Athlon64 X2 4000+ 2gigs 667 Vista Home Basic, I can play Battlefield 2 maxed out but no AA.

If I were you, I wouldn't bother buying anything below a x1950 pro, because the rest of your system is pretty good

There are more things to look at than speed. Bandwidth plays a huge part. For example the 7900 has a slower clock than the 7600, but it has more pixel pipelines which allow to out perform the 7600.

See for yourself:
http://www.gpureview.com/show_card [...] &card2=447
1950pro
http://www.gpureview.com/show_card [...] &card2=466
8600GT
http://www.gpureview.com/show_card [...] &card2=447

wasn't he comparing the 8500 and x1650 not the 8600 and x1950, or did I look at the wrong links

Didn't you say this or did I read it wrong?

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html

you will notice that the 2 cards you listed are there - use the drop down menus to select the 2 different cards you asked about - of course there are some minor differences in the core clocks that you posted as opposed to whats on the VGA charts, but its close enough that it doesn't really matter.

going over the 1650 and 8500 myself - i noticed one thing.

and in answer to your question - what will i loose?

you will loose performance if you (upgraded?) to the 8500

have a look for yourself, in some cases its nearly close to %20 less on the 8500 compared to the 1650

in short the 1650 is a faster card

DX 10 ... well so far the only thing that uses DX 10 is Vista itself

all the games you play now only use DX 9 - and even new games that come out will be able to run on a DX 9 card, game manufactures aren't dumb enough to make a DX 10 only game (yet)

Have you seen the "performance" of the 8500 series while trying to play DX10? DX10 shouldn't be a consideration if you are looking at the 8500 series cards, unless of course you like to game at 800x600. (the 8600 series doesn't do so well either.)