RADEON 8500 Problems

A friend of mine has recently bought an Ati Radeon 8500 with Samsung 4ns Memory Modules.

The card is clocked this way:

254 CPU / 220 Memory.

I discovered this modules are supposed to clock 250 Mhz, but the card isn't stable at this speed (he has overclocked with PowerStrip). Does anybody know why?

One more thing:

He run a 3dMark 2001 SE test and he got a result of 6800 (approx). His rig is an Athlon 1400 (Tbird) with 256 Mb DDR.
Is this right considering the default speed of the card, or there is something wrong? (I know the default speed of an ATI Radeon 8500/Radeon 8500LE is supossed to be 275/275 and 250/250).

The last thing:

He was able to run a 3dMark test with speeds of 250/250, but his score was only 30 pints higher!!! Has anybody experienced similar problems???

Thank's in advance.

Yep I have what is probably an identical card. Radeon 8500 with 4ns Samsung memory chips.
Core is at 250 MHz and memory at 220MHz.
Made by Exair???? And I have the same 'problem'. Core with hit 275 no problem but memory will not even go to 230MHz whereas in theory it should default to 250MHz!!!
Ok I bought it cheap and I think I got what I paid for :(
But not too bothered because the difference between this and my MX400 is HUGE.

Rig is

1800XP+
Abit KR7A-133-RAID
256MB Crucial ram
dvd/cd rw etc

3dMarks :- with MX 400 = 2300 ish
with Radeon = 7700 ish


Only thing that makes sense is the memory chips just aint up to the job.
Happy enough with the card and will do me the now til the G4 4000's come down to a sensible price.

T

Speed ratings are not everything. Even if your chips are 4ns (250MHz), the card itself still has to be of a good quality to support those high speeds. Besides, chips (even if come from same manufacturer) specs are subjective even within same "ns" range - some just o/c better then others ...
And btw, Samsung are not the best o/cers out there, don't know how they managed to improve so much so nVIDIA even put them (exclusively) on the GeForce4 Ti series ... I still remember EliteMT of sweet Ultras :)

RETURN it for a Retail Radeon8500 275-550.

It depends on the quality of parts used, not just the speed rating. That's why some brands oc well and others do not.

Hi! I'm the OEM ATI owner who mentioned my friend msanc024.
Could anyone explain why do I get only 30 extra 3dMarks oclocking the memory (and I get also lots of artifacts) ? I used to overclock my old GeForce 2 MX 400 and I got about 60 extra 3DMarks for every 5 Mhz step.

The default settings are 254/220, memory modules Samsung 4ns
My computer is a 1400TBird, 256DDR

I've seen quite strange things benchmarking my Radeon:

3DMark2001 254/220 6858 3DMarks (no artifacts)
254/250 6888 3DMarks (many artifacts)
240/238 (downclock of GPU) 5500 3DMarks (few artifacts).
285/235 7060 3DMarks (no artifacts)

The question is: why downclocking only 10MHz the GPU my score decreases so much, and why oclocking it a lot and a little the memory, my score only increases 170 points?
I've read that increasing the VCore I should be able to oclock the memory with no problems, but I'm not sure.

Thanks for reading

Quote:

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Originally posted by DABSON!~
RETURN it for a Retail Radeon8500 275-550.

---

I say again return the card and get and original from ATI I did..... I bought a Powercolor and it was defective! Returned it and got a Retail 8500 and i'm so happy with it.. You don't know the Power of the dark side....

i agree w/ DABSON!~ return it and get a retail ATI 8500 u will get higher clock speeds and memrory timeings 275/275 . if ur going to overclock it i would install ram sinks and put a blow hole on the side of ur computer :D

The problem is that he got the OEM card for 190€ (about 166$) and a retail one is about 400 € (about 350 $).

As you see, our country sucks. :(

From my pont of view, in our contry OEMs have a better performance/price ratio, although they don't come at full speed.

u1025425 :
1. Don't rely too much on 3DMark.
2. It's about how ATI cards work with memory, about balancing GPU with proper memory controller techniques.
3. MHz vs. MHz (clocked at same frequencies) nVIDIA cards are faster than ATI ones. Beginning from GeForce2 and Radeon.
4. Don't know about VCore, maybe it works, never had a pleasure to o/c Radeon 8500 before :)

Ok, here's a page where you can do a very simple voltage mod.
Only by penciling! (I suppose many of you already knew it)

http://www.xcl-clan.com/articles.php3?id=29

I have done it successfully on my retail Radeon.

The problem is the design of my friend's board is very different, and we have no information about the manufacturer. So we can't do the mod on his card.

Terminator, could you post some details about Exair (web page, etc). Also, do you have any pics of your card?

Thank's in advance.

hi msanc024

Sorry no digi camera so can't picture the card but the web site for Exair is at :-

http://www.exaircomputer.com/

Please note that the picture shown of the EX-8500 is not the actual card. The card I received has no memory heatsinks.
I tried attaching some heatsinks to the memory modules but it made no difference whatsoever.
As for fiddling with those TINY resistors on the card....not a chance will I do that and don't need any more power right now..All my games run brilliantly..Unreal Tournament runs at 1024x768 32 bit..everything set high and never drops below 70fps :)
Also visual quality is much better than my old Mx400

Like I said happy enough...but would have been nice to get it to run faster.

T