Radeon 8500 Question

I'm probably closing the barn door after the horse has escaped but here goes:

I have spent the past week sifting throught online reviews, manufacturer web sites & various fourms looking for a video card.
Ultimately for reasons of price & based on favorable tests I settled on the Radeon 8500.

I just ordered (by just I mean 10 minutes ago) an OEM Radeon 8500 128MB video card for the new system I'm building. After all the stuff I've read (Reviews, product tests, etc) I still don't know the difference between the 8500 and the 8500LE!

Could some kind soul enlighten me? Have a made the proper decision?

8500's

Odds are you did alright. Is the card built by Ati or Powered by Ati? Some of the 8500LE 128's come with bga memory (square), others come with standard memory. If you got one with bga, you're in the zone. If not, it's still likely a good card.

The difference between LE and normal models is clock speed. Some of the cheapest LE's use lower grade memory and crappy gpu's. But most LE's can be overclocked to regular 8500 speeds and beyond. You'll have to look at the memory chips when you get the card and post what's printed on them.

LE generally 250/250 clock speed. Some are 230/250 however. Some with 4ns memory others with 3.6ns

Non LE aka Retail cards are 275/275 most cards with 3.6ns memory some even faster, or BGA. Generally the Retail cards will reach 300/300 with good cooling.

My 8500LE 64MB with 3.3 ns Hynix ram from Newegg runs stable at 295/320 with a Crystal Orb and some aluminum ram heat sinks (came clocked at 250/275). I know of 128 MB LE cards with BGA memory that can overclock much higher than this.

JoshuaB said:

My 8500LE 64MB with 3.3 ns Hynix ram from Newegg runs stable at 295/320 with a Crystal Orb and some aluminum ram heat sinks (came clocked at 250/275). I know of 128 MB LE cards with BGA memory that can overclock much higher than this.

Click to expand...

I am one of those happy campers with an 8500LE w BGA memory and it clocks well although I have just settled for 300/300 plenty enough for stock cooling

cisco kid

Same card and same overclock stock cooling than cisco kid
can`t go wrong with 8500

How do you find out if an 8500LE has BGA memory before you buy it?

Thanks,
Jeff.

A NEW question:

UPDATE!!! UPDATE!!! UPDATE!!!


Okay, I received the card (it is built by ATI, I'm still not sure what kind of memory is onboard) in very short time, woo hoo! After assembling everything I discovered that the CD ROM I got with it was an older disc.

I've heard nasty things about the original drivers that came out for this card so I DL'ed the latest version from ATI and installed them. It was at this point that I discovered there was a DVD application on the CD ROM that came with the card.

I, thusly installed the app. I then got an error message stating that DirectShow was not installed properly. Now, I have the latest version of DirectX, the DVD did manage to play just fine.

My question is: What should I do? Ignore this error? Should I re-install the new drivers? Is it possible to get a more recent CD ROM from ATI?


Oh, and for what iti's worth... I LOVE the card! Huzzah!!! I can finally play my copy of Warcraft III!