Written By:
Date Posted: June 6, 2002

has had a rough ride. Once king of everything graphics, they've faced increased competition over the past many years. They still do extremely well in the OEM market, but in the retail area, they lost a lot of ground to 3dfx and nVidia. Until the release of the Radeon 7500 Mobility, the nVidia GeForce2 Go was taking away mind and market share when it came down to performance laptops. When the Radeon 8500 was released, controversy over their arose at a time where the GeForce 3, the 8500's direct competition, was ruling the roost.

Thankfully for ATI, things have changed dramaticaly the last few months. Cooked drivers aside, their new 6.13.6043 drivers offer much improved, and "cheat" free performance. The Mobile 7500 is a major success, and ATI scored some major OEM wins with Hercules and Gigabyte. Speaking to my rep, they told me that they'll be pimping ATI more in their options in the coming months.

Specifications

Powered by the revolutionary RADEON" 8500
Features ATI's TRUFORM", SMARTSHADER" and SMOOTHVISION", and HYPER" Z II technologies
The only GPU to support DirectX® 8.1
Supports OpenGL® 1.3 features
64MB of powerful double data rate (DDR) memory
Latest 3D games support the advanced features of RADEON" 8500
Dual monitor and Video output support
Industry-leading DVD video playback
Digital Flat Panel (DVI) support
Supports 3D resolutions (32-bit color) up to 2048x1536
AGP universal bus (for AGP 2X/4X systems)
Designed and manufactured by ATI

We receive a lot of inquiries daily about hardware. The majority of the emails are about the high-end gear, but we get a substantial amount of email asking about cheaper hardware. Well folks, we're going to be looking at the Radeon 8500 64MB LE today, and at ~100$ on , it doesn't come cheaper than this. We won't bore you for 16 pages about stuff you probably already know about, but you'll have to put up with 3 pages of pictures and benchmarks.

By default, the original Radeon 8500s supports a 275MHz core speed, and 275MHz DDR memory speed, which is effectively 550MHz since it's double clocked. Our version, the "Light" or "LE" came 250MHz core speed, and 250MHz DDR memory.

The Radeon 8500 LE ships with 64MB of it. It does not ship with any ram sinks, which I thought was unusual, as the ram is clocked so high, but through our testing, everything was stable. Certainly, if you plan to do some overclocking, you're best to invest in some ram sinks. Unlike some newer cards, BGA ram isn't used here. I know that 64MB may not seem that exciting to most of you, but you'll have to keep in mind that this is now a budget card.

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