ATI OEM

[Crapgame]

OK puny men listen to me now and hear me later.

Dont buy ATI OEM cards unless you know as a fact it is clockable to retail, it prolly isnt.

Im getting so bored with all the WTF is this POS I bought posts all over the net so here it is posted on one of the most popular sites on the net for tech info. ATI retail cards come with nice fast 4.0-3.6ns DDR RAM, OEM cards can run as slow as 5.5ns. This goes for both 8500 and 7500 models as far as I know and may include more. Your card may be so slow that you will never get a proper driver update from ATI cause it wont run at even default settings for retail, overclocking may be right out. Your supposted to be some hooten faloopen PC manufactuar ready and able to post your own version of drivers for your underclocked cards when you buy OEM. If you got one already talk to your reseller about returning it, if they misled you that there fault not ATI's.

 

[rbV5]

<< Your card may be so slow that you will never get a proper driver update from ATI cause it wont run at even default settings for retail, >>



What does clock speed have to do with driver updates?

 

[Crapgame]

Heck maybe nothing but thats what some of the complaints claim so I tossed it out there.
It's enough to me that it makes people check before buying, I always assumed the registry strings that controlled the bios settings came from the drivers so I beleaved them.

 

[rbV5]

It seems the Radeon Le's were/are able to use any driver set and they were clocked well below retail, and I can underclock my card and it still works fine (slower). Heck even the 8500dv is clocked well below retail and seems to perform well.

Personally, I've always gotten Retail boards, but OEM with 90% performance at 50% - 75% of retail price could be a good way to get MOST of the performance of a top notch board. Just do the research first, then decide if its worth the trade-off for OEM parts.