<< I was under the impression that many of the OEM cards are not manufactured by ATI, and these cards were clocked at 250 >>
Well, I was looking at this from Rage3D:
Tuesday, September 25, 2001
ATI Responds on 8500 Clock Speed and More - 3:33 pm EST - Ichneumon [Comments (2)]
I fired off an email yesterday to John B. Challinor II APR, who is Director of Public Relations at ATI. I think they will be of great interest to all of you, and a big thanks to John for responding so quickly!
(note: I have ammended my questions some for this post simply for space reasons... I just removed some of the excess question clarifications.)
Me: Rumor is growing that we'll see the Radeon 8500 released at 300mhz, not the 250mhz that the original preview cards were clocked at. The 75million tris/s spec quoted on the Radeon 8500 web page, vs. the 62.5million tris/s spec quoted on the 8500DV web page suggests this to be the case as well, as we know from initial previews that the 62.5million tris/s number corresponds to a 250mhz core clock. If possible, can you confirm this?
JohnC: [The] RADEON 8500 will ship at 275/275 in early October.
Me: Given the confusion at the release of the original Radeon regarding Retail vs. OEM clock speeds, can we expect similar differences with the release of the 8500? The key question being whether there will be a clear delineation between the Retail card clock speeds and the OEM clock speeds? [...]
JohnC: At this writing, [the] RADEON will ship at 275/275 in retail and OEM.
Me: We have been told that with the release of the 8500 series, the software emulation path for TRUFORM in current Radeon drivers will be removed. [...] Is there any chance that current Radeon users will be allowed to enable software emulation of TRUFORM [...] for those who realize the performance hit that will be incurred? [...]
JohnC: TRUFORM is a feature only available in [the] RADEON 8500.
Well, that pretty much sums up a few of the questions that have been hotly debated lately. Looks like ATI has split the difference between 250 and 300 as was speculated a few weeks ago in this post. Not quite the engineering feat that 300mhz would have been, but still a nice boost from the 250mhz we all initially expected. The OEM vs. Retail answer should ease the concerns of those of you with preorders in right now. Kind of a bummer about TRUFORM, but I know you all want to go out and snag an 8500 at release anyway. ;-)
Well, I've got one on order from Dell (which was the retail version when I ordered it) and one OEM coming Friday from Mwave. I'm building a new system and the only thing that's holding me up is the Radeon. I guess I'll keep the OEM until Dell ships and then just return it. Even if I end up having to eat the 15%, I still think it will be a good deal (provided that ATI gets some working drivers up soon, but that's another story . . .)
