Ati Radeon 8500
Written: May 06 '02
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Great price. Easy To install. Superb Performance
Cons: Not the best drivers
The Bottom Line: Great graphics. Great price. Performance is close to top of the line on the newest games.
|
|
|
| dentinater's Full Review: ATI RADEON 8500, (64 MB) AGP Video Card |
For about $250 canadian you can pick up one of these brilliant cards. These cards are easily compared to the geforce 3 ti 500 cards which are about $400 canadian and in some benchmarks the radeon 8500 beats it. I bought one of these cards a couple months ago and have no regrets. The card works extremely well with my amd thunderbird 1000 mhz and works like a dream with all games. This card peformed extraordinarily well in serious sam the second counter as with the newer games. Tony hawk 3 worked flawlessly.
The 2d performance of ati has always been top notch but it is even better with the radeon 8500. with a 400mhz ramdac compared to geforce 3's 350mhz.
The only thing that chis card lacks is that it runs pretty hot and is not easily overclockerable. i would not recommend overclocking this at all with a stock fan. You could get a decent fan and some memory heat sinks and you could push this card up to a 290/290 memory and core frequency. At stock it is at 275/275.
Some new features of the card are truform, smartshader, smoothvision and hyper z II. Smoothvision is the anti aliasing on the card which get's smoothes out the jagged lines on objects. The card also has anisotropic filtering which will improve the ground detail in games such as unreal tournament, quake 3 and other games. Truform is a unique feature of the radeon 8500 which increases the ammount of traingles on objects which in turn makes surfaces look for real and smooth.
The stock radeon 8500 comes with an svideo out and dvi out for flatscreen and other monitors. The tv out is easy to use and the quaility of the card on svideo out is amazing compared to other cards. Playing games like unreal tournament and tony hawk and dungeon siege on a 36 inch tv is remarkable.
The original drivers for the radeon 8500 were not that great but ati and 3rd party driver makers improved it dramatically and are up to build 6.13.6071 The new drivers compared to the old ones improved the cards quailtiy almost 20% and are continously updating there drivers about once a month.
I would reccomend this card to anyone looking for a really good graphics card but aren't willing to spend $500 on a geforce 4 ti 4600 or ti 4400.
Another thing this card has full support for direct x 8.1 which takes advantages of the shading and other great features of direct x.
Technical info:
General specifications:
0.15micron manufacturing technology;
60 million transistors;
250MHz - 300MHz core frequency;
128bit graphics memory bus;
Supports SDRAM/SGRAM, DDR SDRAM/SGRAM;
16MB - 256MB supported graphics memory capacity;
Up to 300MHz graphics memory frequency, synchronous with the core;
Supports AGP 2x (3.3V), 4X (1.5V), SBA, DMA, DiME;
Supports power control with ACPI 1.0b, OnNow and IAPC.
3D Graphics:
4 pixel pipelines with 2 texturing units each;
Single-pass texturing with up to 6 textures, 2 textures per clock;
Tri-linear and anisotropic filtering;
Bump mapping support: Emboss, EMBM and Dot3 methods;
SMOOTHVISION 2x-6x full-scene anti-aliasing;
DirectX 8.1 pixel shaders up to version 1.4;
DirectX 8.1 vertex shaders up to version 1.1;
Hardware fixed-function T&L unit;
TRUFORM technology;
Hidden surfaces removal (HSR) algorithm - HYPER Z II.
2D Graphics:
Two integrated CRT-controllers;
Integrated 400MHz RAMDAC;
Embedded TMDS-transceiver for digital monitors;
Multi-monitor configurations and HYDRAVISION support;
Hardware MPEG2 decoding (iDCT);
Supports Video-In / Video-Out in case of ATI Rage Theater chip;
Supports GDI functions including Windows XP GDI extensions.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 160
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
dentinater
|
|
Reviews written: 34
Trusted by: 2 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.