Dollar for dollar, RADEON 8500 over GeForce
Written: Feb 18 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great value, support for DirectX 8.0 and higher
Cons: Ati always lags with drivers
The Bottom Line: If ATI would make decent drivers this is a no brainer. But for the price, this is it.
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| cdcellar's Full Review: ATI RADEON 8500, (64 MB) AGP Video Card |
As I started building a killer pc system from scratch (Back last November), I needed a high end video card. Hearing that ATI was coming out with the Radeon 8500 that was supposed to blow away the GeForce3, I waited patiently. I overnighted that baby and stuck her in the motherboard and proceeded to put it to the test.
The installation ran smoothly, DirectX 8.0 came with the installation cd. Running the MadOnion.com 3dmark I was somewhat disatisfied to say the least. My system was only running on par with other similarly equipped systems with geforce3's
Upon installation of the drivers ATI also installed a utility that helped manage your video settings (I removed this from my start up items). Going into the desktop settings I noticed that under Display Adapter settings there was a whole new set of categories that allowed me to change my video performance (antialiasing, blah blah)
Setting the settings for performance, I ran the 3dmark test again with higher hopes and received a slightly higher score. Not good enough though. Quickly going onto the techie sites I heard a lot of commotion of the clock speeds of the ram (buy the retail version which goes faster). I noticed that there were also beta drivers posted up that required directx 8.1. Downloading directx 8.1 and the beta drivers, I finally got the benchmark scores to be the tops in most categories. Going up against my friend's Geforce 3 though, everything was still neck and neck.
So how does this thing do in games? Counterstrike, being the only game I really play, I decided to give it a couple shots (no pun intended). Pulling up the frames per second (fps), the results remained around 85 fps. The Geforce3 goes over 99fps consistently! Also, I noticed with the beta drivers a black box appeared occasionally when playing counterstrike. This become quite a nuisance.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 250
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Epinions.com ID:
cdcellar
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Reviews written: 19
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