Close, but no cigar...
Written: Jan 04 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Price, Benchmarks
Cons: Drivers
The Bottom Line: If they fix the drivers on this baby it has the potential to make it the fastest card on the market.
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| darryl_h's Full Review: ATI RADEON 8500, (64 MB) AGP Video Card |
Introduction:
The ATI Radeon cards seem to be the best video cards on the market, and they are, from a hardware point of view. With the highest available chip clock on the market (275MHz) the fastest memory at 550MHz.
Installation:
Installation was quite simple, as it should be, just plug and play. :)
Drivers:
Driver installation was quite easy, the features of the drivers were quite nice, but with all Smoothvision all the way up, the FPS (Frames Per Second) seemed to drop. With Aquanox some of the textures weren't being rendered properly (they would flash from just a plain side to a textured side) and after tinkering for some time I was not able to resolve the issue, even with a new operating system and drivers. On Half Life (not the one that's tailored for the Radeon) at the maximum resolution it plays in a box where you can see the taskbar and about the same amount of your desktop on the top. Quite distracting, but I did do really well that round with my desert eagle.. go figure. ;)
Image Quality / Speed:
Image quality was defiantly better than my older card, and on 3DMark it scored an impressive 7322 but it also scored around 2000 at one point, apparently the drivers have been tweaked for 3dmark and quake, but I have no hard proof of that.
Conclusion:
Price is defiantly better than the competitors, and the benchmarks seem impressive, but without driver support this is not something I can recommend as a great product is only as strong as it's weakest link, in this case, it's defiantly the drivers. Why they don't make the drivers open source and try and get some of the community working on it with them is beyond me.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 200.00
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Epinions.com ID:
darryl_h
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Reviews written: 6
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