ATI Radeon 8500 128MB Review

Introduction

When you mention the name ATI just about everybody has heard of them. The 8500 card was ATI's flagship card until this week when the 9700 was released. Now people wanting or looking to upgrade will have a better chance of getting the higher end cards with prices dropping. I always get asked "what’s better the ATI 8500 or the Geforce 4 4600TI"? Well today we will cover this question. ATI has had a history of problems with their drivers for their video cards. Has that problem been fixed? We will cover this as well.

Nice looking box to attract consumers.

Specifications

275 MHZ Core clock

275 MHZ memory clock

400 MHZ Ramdac

8.8GB/Sec Memory Bandwidth

2.4 billion Pixels Per Second

HyperZ II

Truform

Smoothvision

AGP 2X/4X compatible

DirectX 8.1

OpenGL 1.3 support

Memory:

128MB On-board DDR memory

TV-out:

TV-out up to 1024x768 resolutions

Driver support:

Win 2K, ME, Win 98, WinXP

System Requirements:

Intel Pentium II/III/Celeron, Pentium 4

AMD Athlon/Duron/XP

(systems with AGP 2.0 Slot and up to 4.0)

Not a great looking card, but since when have ATI had good looking cards. No ram sinks hmm wonder if it will come back to haunt them?

This is one thing that really bugs me, for a card that is supposed to be the best, why would you put on such a small fan???? Will it hurt the card we shall see.

As you can see there is a VGA port, S-Video and a DVI Connector for those of you that like your Flat Panel Display Monitors.

Lots of cables for all your needs.

Oh sure they put half life in the software package I just bought the game last week. Also included was driver disk.

What you get:

Video Card

Driver/DVD Driver CD

S-Video Cord

DVI Connector

Patch cables

Game Half life

Instructions

Warranty card

I am going to run a series of tests with 3dmark 2001, Quake and Comanche 4. I will be comparing it to the 4600TI. Please note that the scores on the 4600Ti were tested on a 1800 MHz P4. I will be doing a review on a new 4600TI in a few days because my old one is getting tired.:)

So let’s get started and see how the card performs. I love this part :)