Im getting a new radeon 8500 retail this saturday!

[LongCoolMother]

if you dont have any recomendations, imn gonna get it this saturday. What drivers should i update first? flash BIOS? anything i should know? ill be using with my ecs k7s5a. Funny thing is, im gonna pay less for it than how much i paid for my voodoo 5500 that i use currently, lol

 

[Jalidi]

Go to www.rage3d.com and download the appropriate drivers for your OS. I have the same motherboard as you do (K7S5A) and I'm curious to see whether you get any conflicts with it since I'm planning to get a Radeon 8500 soon. After you've got it installed and running 100% rock stable, come back and talk about your experience. And, above all, do benchmarks!

 

[sc0tty8]

Don't touch the bios, it does not need anything. I use the drivers from the ATI site since I had MAJOR issues with the ones from rage3d, I do not know if it was because of the motherboard or what(ali chipset) but I had openHGL probs with all drivers and random lockups It is a VERY sexy card, and you do not need to OC it or anything.

 

[BFG10K]

Be sure to remove all traces of your 3dfx card, drivers and software before you install your Radeon. As for your drivers, the latest leaked beta 6043s seem to be pretty cool.

 

[Killrose]

Don't bios flash. You don't need it as your card is a retail one and runs default 275/275. I wish I could have gotten in on that deal. Instead I bought an LE from someone, and am going to have to mod the ram voltage and bios flash it. I'm going to whore my way into a retail.

 

[spanky]

I'm going to whore my way into a retail.

killrose the radeon pimp
i got my 8500 on monday, installed it on wed. here's the thing tho... is it normal... that when i max out my quality settings and play cs @ max resolution... my fps is like 30 and choppy as a mofo. when i used my voodoo5 and turned AA on, i had the same problem. does this happen in like every game where AA is on? if that is the case... i find AA to be pretty darn near useless.

 

[Killrose]

<< killrose the radeon pimp >>


That'd be me!!, hey it worked on the last 8500 I had, but it only had 4ns ram and the core crapped out at about 281MHz, so off to the Forums it went.

On the AA deal, people say forget the AA and run Hi res Ansio instead. But hey, what do I know.

 

[FishTankX]

Turn off AA, Spanky, the Radeon8500 suffers a terrible performance hit with it on.

 

[arcas]

I got in on the Radeon 8500 deal at Best Buy last weekend. First time I can remember going to BB and actually walking away with the advertised
item. I upgraded from a TNT2 Ultra. In my experience, though, I just don't notice much difference between the TNT2's and the 8500's visual
quality in Counterstrike. I even tried the CS that came with the 8500 (supposedly "Truform enabled" though I can't tell a difference).
I haven't downloaded any new models so maybe that's the problem. I generally play at 11x8 or 10x7. Didn't have any luck getting the 8500
to play at 1280x960 fullscreen.

One thing I did notice is that with the 8500 with the 6037 drivers, CS has a tendency to hang when switching resolutions when connecting to
and disconnecting from a server. What I wound up doing is lowering my windows res to 1280x1024, setting my CS res to 1280x960 and
playing CS in a window instead of full-screen. In this mode, there are 32 pixels of desktop above and below the game window but during
a game, it's really not noticible and FPS isn't affected. No more resolution switching == no more hangs

 

[spanky]

killrose: yep, thats exactly what i did. off with AA and maxed out my ansitropic filtering @ max res. it looks great and all, but i still wanted some AA lovin' is there any card out there that can handle AA without such a horrible performace hit? i mean, if the card can't handle AA (my radeon sees performance hits even at 800x600)... i would conclude that its just an advertising gimmick. very dissappointed.

 

[Killrose]

<< I upgraded from a TNT2 Ultra. In my experience, though, I just don't notice much difference between the TNT2's and the 8500's visual >>


Your monitor must be as crappy as mine...a Sylvania F74, LOL.