Radeon 8500 overclockable?

[Jhill]

I always hear of people overclocking their Gf3's. I am wondering if the Radeon is overclockable? Also I know that the retain runs at275-550 speeds. What does the OEM version run at?

 

[Wango]

The OEM runs at 250/250. I think there are utilities available to overclock the Radeons, try Rage3D but I haven't heard what kind of overclocks people are getting out of their cards.

 

[AA0]

The retail 8500s can hit over 300 when o/ced, not sure about the OEMS, but they are a lot better at o/cing then the Ti500s.

 

[Jhill]

Why do some people say that the oem runs at 250-250 and some people say 250-500?

 

[bunnyfubbles]

Both 250/250 and 250/500 represent the same thing. When we see 250/250, the second 250 represents the SDR clock rate of the ram which would be 250MHz. However, the Radeon 8500 uses DDR ram, which in theory doubles the performance. So instead of 250MHz, we get a 500MHz clock due to the Double Data Rate.

As far as I know, ATI's 8500 OEM boards use the same hardware found in their retail boards, so they should clock the same. I have also heard reports that people have been able to overclock OEM boards as far as the retail boards go, which is around 300/300 (300/600) for some. 3rd party manufacturers of retail and OEM boards might not produce their boards exactly the way ATI does, so we could see poor 2D quality and slower ram thrown on 3rd party Radeon boards. However, we should also see lower prices on some of those boards.