Whats the Diff. between Retail Radeon 8500 and OEM?

[Jonathan59]

Whats the Diff. between Retail Radeon 8500 and OEM? Is there a speed diff? If there is, is it noticeable? Which is faster OEM ATI Radeon 8500 or Geforce 3 Ti200?

 

[FreakyGuy]

Retail cards are clocked at 275 core 275 memory and OEM cards are clocked at 250/250 or 225/225.

 

[Jonathan59]

Will the diffrence be noticeable? How can i tell if the one im going to buy has the 250mhz or 225mhz mem and core clock? Would the 225Mhz version still be faster than Geforce Ti200?

 

[Jonathan59]

Is the OEM Version also called the Radeon 8500LE?

 

[Duvie]

I would just stick to retail box cards...get the warranty and no surprises like the great radeon le debacle at newegg one year ago...

I think the oem cards (made in china like the ati) Say "powered by ATI"...about the only thing that is truly ati is the gpu....often some features are turned off (ala le)...ddr ram is substandard to retail boards (in terms of ns)...often no active cooling or decent hsf combos on chips...often no ramsinks though I don't know on these boards ...

 

[Rand]

<< I would just stick to retail box cards...get the warranty and no surprises like the great radeon le debacle at newegg one year ago...

I think the oem cards (made in china like the ati) Say "powered by ATI"...about the only thing that is truly ati is the gpu....often some features are turned off (ala le)...ddr ram is substandard to retail boards (in terms of ns)...often no active cooling or decent hsf combos on chips...often no ramsinks though I don't know on these boards ... >>



NONE of the R8500's have any of the features of the GPU disabled, in fact the only Radeon cores that ever did was the Radeon LE from the R100 core.
HSF combo is the same between retail and OEM. Memory utilized is almost exactly the same, and NONE of the R8500's use ramsinks. In fact I'm pretty sure no ATI Radeon board has ever shipped with ramsinks.

"Powered" by ATi means it's a third party card, just because it's OEM doesnt mean it's a "Powered by ATi" third party card. And at least in the case of third party R8500's your pretty safe as all third party R8500 boards are presently being manufactured by ATi themselves and are merely sold to the third party that sets their own clockspeeds, and re-labels the card for their own brand name.

ATi's own Retail R8500's run at 275/275 and use 3.6 or 3.8ns DDR SDRAM.
ATi's own OEM R8500's runs at 250/250 and uses 3.6 or 3.8 DDR SDRAM
Third party R8500's in Retail or OEM are typically 250/250, though a very small number are clocked at 225/225. They use 3.6, 3.8, or 4.0ns DDR SDRAM.

The AIW R8500DV is the exception to the above as it runs at 230/190, and uses 4ns DDR SDRAM. This is true for both Retail and OEM version of it.

Performance difference between the 275/275 and 250/250 boards is approximately 5% in most cases, the clockspeed difference is 10% though naturally pereformance doesnt scale perfectly with clockspeed.
Performance difference between the 225/225 and 275/275 boards is approximately 9% in most cases.

Even the 225/225 R8500 generally performs slightly above the GF3 Ti200, as the R8500DV generally performs roughly on-par with the Ti200.
The 275/275 board is generally slightly below the GF3 Ti500, and the 250/250 board is usually on-par with the original GF3 which was almost dead in the middle of the GF3 Ti500 and Ti200 performance levels.

Ideally, I'd recommend buying ATi's own OEM or Retail cards, though even the third party ones are pretty safe when it comes to the R8500.

 

[Duvie]

good info!!!

Why is the dv card so neutered in core and ram speed and quality of ram???

 

[Rand]

<< good info!!!

Why is the dv card so neutered in core and ram speed and quality of ram??? >>



My best guess is that signal integrity is severely compromised because of all the additional components on the All In Wonder R8500DV, it most likely causes a lot of interference. That could necessitiate a lower clockspeed for the 8500DV board relative to the others. That seems the post likely possibility IMHO.
If not that, then perhaps ATi simply uses the lower yeild R8500 chips on the 8500DV boards.

As for the memory, I doubt really consider it 'neutered' as it's still 4ns which is theoretically capable of 250MHz which is substantially higher then that of the default memory clock of merely 380MHz.

 

[Rellik]

Andd one more info:

The new batch now comes with 128MB with NO price difference.
The bulk Radeon from ATI is "new" in the way that ATI initially did not provide a Bulk version(OEM is misleading; technically, ATI can´t produce OEM since OEM is a third party product derived from original
hardwareLet´s call them what they are: 8500LE.

I have a retail 8500 from ATI. You can get away cheaper if you buy the LE. The ATI LE is probably the "wisest" choice since the card is 100 Bucks cheaper(199 to 299 US $)