Radeon 8500 & Windows XP

[Tullphan]

I'm getting ready to do a system upgrade.
I'll be going with the IWill XP333 mb, XP1700 (w/Swiftech MCX370-T), Corsair PC2700 inside my 1040B case running WinXP Pro.
At first I was going to get the Gainward GF3 (Golden Sample), but it seems to be about 60/40 in favor of the Radeon 8500 (depending on the thread & the day).
I've heard there are or were some issues with the 8500 & the drivers for XP. Is this still the case? I'm no tech & I don't have the time or the patience to do troubleshooting.
The card I get will not be limited to strictly gaming or strictly 2D, but for all around work/play.
Comments? Suggestions?

 

[Vortex22]

No problems here.

 

[Chucu]

I have not had any problems with the 8500 and XP. But I LOVE the 8500 in my windows 98SE machine.
Charles

 

[Daovonnaex]

<< I'm getting ready to do a system upgrade.
I'll be going with the IWill XP333 mb, XP1700 (w/Swiftech MCX370-T), Corsair PC2700 inside my 1040B case running WinXP Pro.
At first I was going to get the Gainward GF3 (Golden Sample), but it seems to be about 60/40 in favor of the Radeon 8500 (depending on the thread & the day).
I've heard there are or were some issues with the 8500 & the drivers for XP. Is this still the case? I'm no tech & I don't have the time or the patience to do troubleshooting.
The card I get will not be limited to strictly gaming or strictly 2D, but for all around work/play.
Comments? Suggestions? >>

Since you're getting a board with an ALi MAGiK1 chipset (*shudders*) and Windows XP, getting a GF3 is the last thing you'd want to do (infinite loop error). Hence, the Radeon 8500 makes perfect sense.

 

[Pliablemoose]

I just installed an 8500 on my XP system & got BSOD'd till I downloaded & installed Alternate Driver - 6.13.10.3286 from ATI's website. Looks pretty good now

 

[Tullphan]

"shudders"?

Ok...so what's the deal with the "LE"...Neweggs description says "Core: 230MHz, NO DVI to VGA Adaptor!". Wassup wid dat? Is that something everyone would use?

"shudders"?

 

[Theslowone]

a little bit of problems with tv out, the display is perfect it just getting stuff to change over right, each driver changes it up a little bit, but other then that i am very happy.

 

[Tullphan]

So is the Radeon LE that Newegg has a good deal?
What does the DVI to VGA do?

 

[Theslowone]

It is good even though they had it listed at 240 core b4, but mine came at 250 from there. I flashed mine to regular, not sayin i recommend it but thats what i did. The dvi to vga ables you to hook two regular monitors up at one time, dual displays on two analog monitors, you still can output to one analog, one digital, and the tv with no problem, its just you don't have the connector to hook two analogs up at the same time.

 

[Daovonnaex]

<< "shudders"?

Ok...so what's the deal with the "LE"...Neweggs description says "Core: 230MHz, NO DVI to VGA Adaptor!". Wassup wid dat? Is that something everyone would use?

"shudders"? >>

The 8500LE is a castrated Radeon 8500 with slower core and mem clocks, and the RAM is 5.5ns (instead of the 3.8 and 4.0 ns available on OEM and retail [not in an ordered pair]). And it doesn't come with a DVI port to VGA port dongle.

Oh yes, and the shudders was in reference to the poor performance of the ALi MAGiK1.

 

[Tullphan]

The last review I read of the IWill didn't show poor performance. But I guess every review's gonna be different and everyone is going to have their own opinion.

 

[Daovonnaex]

<< The last review I read of the IWill didn't show poor performance. But I guess every review's gonna be different and everyone is going to have their own opinion. >>

It's not downright bad, but it's fairly poor. When the fsb and mem are at 166, it barely edges out the KR7A at 133/133 for performance.

 

[Theslowone]

Daovonnaex
I don't think the ram on the le are even close to 5.5 they get to high of a clock speed to be that high, the ram is the same as the retail. It is hynix 3.6ns ram, the 7500 uses 4.0 ns ram.

But I agree 100% on the poor performance of the ali 1.

This is off of rage3d.com:
R200, is the latest graphic chip of ATI that gives full hardware support to DirectX v8.x and ATI8500LE uses this chip as GPU. In fact there is no such a model on the market called 8500LE, it is only produced and sold to OEM companies. The only difference between ATI8500 is that the core and RAM frequencies are 250/250 MHz. instead of 275/275 MHz. R200, with its T&L (Transform, Clipping and Lighting) unit, called Charisma Engine II, has the ability to draw 69M polygons per second. Can reach up to a 8.8 GB/s bandwidth using 275 MHz. DDR Rams and its HyperZ-II technology. Its 3D rendering engine is called Pixel Tapestry-II and can process 6 textures at a time using 4 parallel rendering pipelines. This gives a fill-rate of 2.2 GigaTexel/s. Besides there is an FSAA engine called Smoothvision. Moreover, unlike NV20, it has dual-display support and gives a better 2D image quality with its 400MHz. RAMDAC. And finally ATI will announce R300 in the near future to compete with NVIDIA?s GeForce4.