Warning about cheap Radeons on pricewatch

[MGMorden]

Just wanted to let you guys know that some of the places on Pricewatch are selling OEM Radeon's with no fan, only a heatsink (and though I haven't confirmed this, I've heard others report that these cards are clocked at 143mhz for mem/core instead of 166mhz). I can confirm that z-buy.com is one of these stores selling them, as I just received mine today. Just a word of warning. You might want to avoid these new $120 Radeons popping up a pricewatch.

UPDATE: After downloading Powerstrip and checking, the default for the card I received is actually 148mhz, not 143mhz.

 

[Biggs]

So is it now true what this thread has to say about retail Radeons?

 

[MGMorden]

Right now I would say to go with a Retail Radeon over an OEM, as the differences seem to be quite large between them. I've always had good experiences buying OEM over Retail though. Oh well, I guess there's an exception to every rule. I'm not going to worry about it too much (I only paid $120, and I am coming from a TNT2 here), but I am a little dissapointed.

 

[MADCAP]

What is your ram rated at. If it is the normal rated speed then just powerstrip it, and run it at retail speed. If you have 6ns ram you're golden. Don't worry so much about the fan as the Radeon runs cool. But if it happens to present a problem then buy a $12 blue orb, or radio shack 486 fan to stick on the heatsink.

 

[Taz4158]

Only the RETAIL 64 meg Radeon VIVO is clocked at 183. All the rest are 166 unless your looking at the ODD Engineering Sample some of which had 5.5 ram but were clocked at 144. Powerstrip is always off slightly on the clocking.

 

[MGMorden]

If the powerstrip slider is off then it could well be at 166mhz, but 166 to 148.5mhz seems like a wide margin of error. Still, PS doens't seem like an inredibly reliable program (if ANY other way to overclock the radeon becomes available I'm jumping on that instead). I moved the slider in PowerStrip up to 175mhz and the card ran fine. I wish there was a more permanent solution though (like flashing an overclocked speed to the bios, like is possible with the nvidia cards).

 

[Zenmervolt]

I do remember hearing somewhere that the OEM Radeon cars were clocked at a slower speed than the retail card, and I recall it being something like 143/143. I'm not sure how reliable it was, but it enough to keep me away from the OEM cards.

Zenmervolt

 

[mschell]

ATI has always detuned OEM cards. The Rage Magnum is a pre Radeon example. OEM's want the cheapest price and most users of OEM systems would not notice the decreased performance.
Our local Oregon Fred Meyer dept store is selling Retail Radeon DDR cards for $129.99

 

[oldfart]

I got burned by this. I ordered one for a friend to upgrade his system. He doesn't know much about PC hardware, and trusted me to tell him what to get. The z-buy website clearly shows this as a 166/166 part. I told the guy to send it back. If there were a better way than Powerstrip to up the speed, it wouldn't be so bad. At this point, I'm not sure how hard it is going to be to have them take it back. What a pain :|

 

[Mule]

hmm. 143 mhz no problem, no fan no problem. I have the retail version of the Radeon 32MB DDR and I see no significant difference in overclocking the ram or the GPU. 2 or 4 more fps doesn't make any difference. Just bump that 143/143 mhz to 166/166, it should run fine. Also the fan on the Radeon was kinda loud so I just unpluged it, I checked the heatsink after several hours of counterstrike and it was cool as a cat. I could rip that heatsink off too if I wanted to.

A Radeon for 120 you can't beat, if I had to do it over again, I would probably go for that deal.