who here has a radeon 8500, how do you like?

i'm in the market for a new vid card and speakers.. for my main system, you can see what i have now in the specs.. i'd be upgrading from a 32mb ddr radeon.. so.. there'd be a pretty decent jump in speed how do you guys like the 8500 cards? play dvd's good i hear, which is a must for me.. how do they oc? what sort of fan can you put on them? could i save some moolah and get an LE just lower clock and memory speed isnt it? thx guys

You could also use the search feature and look for posts that have been regurgitated X 100 already.

Not to sound rude but it's there for a reason. Some of us don't like seeing the same topic post twice in a week.

well I'm running an 8500 OEM........and my experience hasn't been that great. I know that every time someone brings up the issue of ATI's drivers it divides people into those who A: think ATI's drivers are just fine, and think anyone who says ATI's drivers suck are just anti-ATI and B: those who have problems with them.

Personally, I'm in the B section. I've had my machine crash, and i get the XP message saying the crash is related to my ATI drivers. I get random lockups in ALL my FPS games, ghost recon, CS, DOD, UT, Tribes2...and some seem to be loop-type lockups, and others seem to be an overheating issue or something. (although i've read up on creative's SB soundcard issues causing crashes and this may be contributing to it).

As far as graphics quality, the graphics are good, the 2d is excellent except for the "font corruption" issue that some people are coming across....Sometimes the fonts onscreen just won't show up with all the pixels in individual letters, (usually what happens is most of the vertical lines in letters disappear).

I have to say that I am going to run a radeon 7000 in a secondary machine that i'm going to build here in a week or two...i'm ready to give ATI another try but I will have to say that my Nvidia gf2 never gave me the problems i've encountered with ATI so far.... and there was a thread here at OC about the font corruption, so i'm not the only one who has experienced it.

anyways.....my personal opinion is that buying ATI is kind of a crap shoot....for some people their cards work just great and other people have constant problems with them. I'm about to RMA the 8500, so I can sell it and give the gf4 ti4200 a try when it comes out....the prices will be about the same, and we'll see how the nvidia product does.

oh...here's an example of the "font corruption" problem I've encountered:

Radeon 8500 is a great card for the PRICE... but a G3 Ti 500 is better.. Don't let the numbers in 3dmark2001 fool you... G3 is faster...

I have a retail 128 ddr radeon and I like it so far. Food for thought

I have to agree with h2Olink. I've had my Radeon 8500 for a couple months and although it is a good card, the driver issues are a pain in the A$$.

I've had several ATI cards, NVidia cards, even a Matrox card and I've never had as many issues with any of them as I have with this Radeon 8500 (retail, by the way). If I had it to do over again, I would buy a Geforce 3 Ti card. Nvidia has always delivered good drivers, good performance, and better overclocking potential than ATI cards.

I wish I had listened to the folks that said "Stay away from the Radeon 8500." and not the folks that said "Once ATI gets the drivers fixed, the Radeon 8500 will be the best card on the market." It hasn't happened yet, and it probably won't.

My two cents.

Overclocker456 said:

Radeon 8500 is a great card for the PRICE... but a G3 Ti 500 is better.. Don't let the numbers in 3dmark2001 fool you... G3 is faster...

Click to expand...

Haven't you seen Ati's new drivers??? Kills the G3, the only time it looses is when the software doesn't have much support for Ati.

IMHO,
M_N

well thanks for all the input guys, gives me something to think about... i do think i'm going to wait until i can find out SOMETHING more about 3dlabs's new one.. i hope all the rumors are true!

good card!