ATI Radeon 8500 64MB

[gibsinep]

well i am looking to buy a new vid card. AND this looks like a good card. I found a ATI Radeon 8500 64MB for $166.00 plus ship
at http://www.ibuypower.com
isnt this a little low for this card. I went to resellerratings.com and ibuypower got good reviews.

anything i should know about this card or this company

thanks

[TimDgsr]

the company sent me my products on time, no hassles

it is an OEM version though, means the clock speed is going to be lower than a retail.

you always have the option of flashing the cards bios and or overclocking it. There are also several different speeds of ram that came on the different versions of cards. For more info on that a lot of people over at www.overclockers.com forums are quite knowledgeable about modifying the 8500.

[JohnC]

gibsinep,

Dude this card is awsome. I've got two of them.(two machines) I initially had GeForce 2's and they sucked. The ATI 8500 is much more stable - especially with Open-GL apps and games.

The $166 price is a bit low. Make sure it's not the LE version. That's the cheap one offered from Asia. The RETAIL package $250 (or was two months ago) is the real deal. The LE and others use slower chips.

ATI is one of the largest and oldest video card manufactures. They, at one time were one of the largest OEM manufacturers supplying chips for laptops and systems for everyone including Apple. They are a Canadian company located in Toronto.

Hope this helps.

John

[jcandel]

I bought a retail 8500 on ebay for $200 +$15 S&H.This card blows my Ti 200 away.I scored 7000 3d marks running the card @ 280/300.This on a 1 GHz t`bird @ 1266.Stable,no install problems.I`m one happy camper.<J>

[dathenv]

So what did you get on your Ti200?

[JeffD]

Hi gibsinep,

For $166 this is indeed a OEM version. The biggest question is what version is it since there are two:

--clocked at 250

--clocked at 230

Keep in mind the 230 version will benchmark quite a bit lower than the retail (275) version. While TimDgsr is right that you can do a bit of tweaking (flash bios, voltage trick, overclock utility) to get higher speeds, the amount of overclock you get may be limited by the quality/speed rating of the ram used on the card.

Also, even at 230 a Radeon 8500 is one fine card that will run virtually any game you play at a good fps......and look great doing it.

On another note:

Hey jcandel, what Ti200 did you get? I ask this since you said your 8500 (at 7000 in 3Dmark) blows your Ti200 away and actually.........

--7000 is below average for a 8500. 8000-9000 is a much better score (10,000+ being great)

--With a little bit of tweaking I got 7128 3Dmark 2001 with my PNY GF3 Ti200. Higher end systems then mine get up to 9000 on 3Dmark 2001 (not that far off the best Radeon 8500).

So what kind of score did you get with your Ti200 and what drivers, tweaking utility did you use?

Regards,

JeffD

[gibsinep]

thx for the info

[jcandel]

3DMark scores are dependant on the card and the system.My scores were compared to simular systems.2gig sytems,DDR ram,Raid and higher OCing all raise scores.My Ti 200 scored 6031.I could have gotten a higher score if I had time to play with it.(sold the sys)Though, the graphics are much better with the radeon.<J>

[JeffD]

Hi jcandel,

That explains the 3Dmark scores being low using both the Ti200 and 8500.....although the specs you gave are pretty high end and I would have expected much higher scores from both cards.

A word on graphics quality:

I have both ATI and nvidia products. While there are differences in graphics quality.....one could argue they are not big enough to really be a major concern with product purchase. In fact, depending on who you talk to, one may prefer one graphics style to another.....remember beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

A good example of this is in the console area.

Remember the huge leap in graphics with the Playstation over the good old SNES and Genesis? Then came the Dreamcast...another WOW! Now the PS2 comes out and people say....better....but not jaw dropping over the Dreamcast....the same can be said with the Gamecube and Xbox.

Moral of the story is we are now in a time where graphics quality is not making huge leaps in innovation over similar products and over the previous generation. We are plateauing............

Same can be said with computer graphics of today......the differences between products such as a radeon I, 8500, GF2, GF3, GF3 Ti500 and any other card out in the past year or two is subjective at best.

Regards,

JeffD