Radeon 8500 DV

[Spikesoldier]

Is it worth every penny for the $318.95? Looks like it to me, but I've heard that there are many bugs associated with this card in particular. Anyone wishing to expand on that?

 

[Spikesoldier]

-Bump

 

[MrCoyote]

It's not as fast as the regular 8500. It's memory/GPU clock is lower. I have 8500 and it does have some slight issues, but the new drivers that came out last month fixed some stuff. Also, with my 8500, to watch stuff on TV, I have to bump the resolution down to 800x600 on my monitor, or the desktop scrolls on the TV. I had hoped ATI would've implemented TV-out correctly this time. Oh well, I guess I'll have to buy a seperate DVD player.

The 8500DV also doesn't have MPEG2 hardware encoding, so if you want to capture stuff, it will use your CPU to encode video to MPEG2. The old Radeon had hardware decoding and encoding. But it will capture stuff in an uncompressed format, but it will eat up about 100MB+ a minute for video, so make sure you have a big hard drive!