Radeon 8500LE=Bad?

[Bagheera]

Hey all. Just received my Radeon 8500 retail version, and the graphics are perfect here. Prior to this I ordered a Radeon 8500 OEM from Accubyte and got enormous amount of rendering artifacts in 3D applications.

I know that the 8500LE cores are usually lower-quality than the retail version and they are only certified to run at 250MHZ (even though the one Accubyte sold me was clocked at 230MHZ), but I am wondering is ATI also have lower product quality monitoring for their 8500 LE cores? Because I am very sure that 8500 LE card I returned had a defective core. It shouldn't even have passed the test at the factory...

The retail version is really sweet though...

 

[Bagheera]

BTW just wondering, does anyone have a Radeon 8500 LE that is running fine? And anyone have a experience with a defective 8500LE?

 

[JustinSampson]

I have a 8500LE and it works perfect. The only problem I have is with M.O.H. I get an artifact on the soldiers face (only once and a while). RTCW, UT, Q3 and every other game I have run perfectly though.

 

[Mavrick007]

The 8500 LE is supposed to be the one that is supplied for "OEM" when you see it listed.
There are places that are supplying the 8500 with 230/230 for the OEM but that is actually the 8500LeLe.
It's a bit confusing cause I would want to make sure the OEM at one site is the same as at another site.
The Retail has 275/275, the OEM has 250/250, and the Le has 230/230 but their naming convention is a bit hard to follow since they use the 8500LeLe.

 

[Bagheera]

Well, that's why I was so angry at Accubyte, you see. On their site they listed the card as "Radeon 8500". It mentioned the word OEM, sure. But nothing about LE. So I bought it with the expectation that it ran at 250MHZ. But nooooo. It ran at 230MHZ. And Accubyte even sell them at $189. That's more expensive than almost any other competitors out there, even those carrying 250MHZ OEM versions. Bad, bad Accubyte. I should sue them.

I think if the core runs at 230 it must be of very low quality then, that would explain the defects.

 

[Orbius]

Why does ATi shoot themselves in the foot? All the Difference between the GF3 and GF3 Ti500 is clock speed and Ram speed, just like the difference between the Radeon 8500 and the Radeon 8500 LE, but somehow ATi has managed to make the 8500 LE feel like an inferior product. They should have called the Radeon 8500 LE the Radeon 8300 or something.

 

[Bagheera]

Not true. On the surface it does look like Radeon LE is just a slower version of Radeon (and technically, may be). But if you look at the marketing strategy here then it's something else.

Radeon 8500 LE is a way for ATI to save themselves some money from throwing out low-quality or defective GPU cores that don't make the mark. All retail Radeon 8500 have high quality cores and memories that are certified to run at 275 mhz. The Radeon LE cores are the defective ones that produce artifacts or don't work when ran at 275mhz. So they lower the clock speed and sale those GPUs as the Radeon LE. For some of those cores, lowering the clock speed fixes the rendering problems. But for unfortunate customers like me, sometimes lowering the clock speed doesn't fix the problem.

Shipping the card back to Accubyte costed $4; their shipping & handling, $16.99, is non-refundable (what a rip-off); and their restocking fee, $30. I lost a total of $51 just buying a defective card at a not-so-cheap price (later found out on PriceWatch some retailers sell 8500 LE for $165 and below. Accubyte carries it for $189. Anandtech's price report is inaccurate. ). Those $51 I could have spent on a memory upgrade or an OEM Audigy...

 

[Bagheera]

BTW another piece of a puzzle: I think the Radeon 8550 LE I returned had a defective Rage Theatre chipset as well. I had two problems:

1) When watching DVDs with Motion Compensation enabled, the card produces blue and green blocky artifacts all over the image. Turning off the motion compensation fixes the problem (does not occur on the retail card. Playing DVDs with motion compensation enabled runs just fine)

2) The Overlay is defective. DVD image quality is awful. You can see borders around different color ranges. It's almost like viewing DVDs with only 16-bit color enabled. The problem is fixed, however, if I lower the Gamma to 0 (the default is 1)

Also, there was also a problem with the scenematics of various games: When a game's cinematic plays, the image on the left side don't get cleared. It's a strange phenomenom, but it's almost like all the past frames are squeezed and distorted toward the left side untill the entire left side of the screen is filled with the colors from the playback...

Might anyone be able to link these problems (which are obviously 2D-related) back to the artifacts I got in 3D applications? Someone mentioned something about a possibly defective RAM on the card...

 

[AlastorX82]

Why did you have to pay a restocking fee on a defective product?