Radeon 8500 Questions

[TC10284]

Hello. Here's the story, I ordered a Gigabyte GA-6OXT-A Socket 370 motherboard from the refurbished section of Newegg. Well, the package gets here and it's really a RADEON 8500 64MB AGP VGA DVI-I TVOUT PAL(identified using the P/N on the video card on ATI's site). Well, the card works fine as far as I can tell. I didn't have time to install the Catalyst 2.5 drivers and run a 3DMark on it or any other 3D Game(I will later). But, it works fine with the Windows drivers until I can test it with the Catalyst drivers. The card looks used but as long as it works OK then I'm not gonna send it back. OK, to my questions. Does this card perform as good as or better than a Geforce 2 Ti or a Geforce 3? If so, should I replace my Geforce 2 Ti 64MB in my secondary computer with the Radeon 8500 or would the Geforce 2 Ti perform better? The CPU in it is an Athlon XP 1600+ 1.4GHz with 512MB of PC2100 DDR. Would it perform as good as or better than a Geforce 3 Ti 200? I have a Geforce 3 Ti 200 64MB in my main Athlon XP 2100+ 1.73GHz machine. Thanks for your time!

 

[socram]

radeon 8500 is definetly better than Gforce 2ti... if your not sure, why don't you check tom's charts for video benchmarks...

 

[socram]

and better than gforce3ti200

 

[Slava]

Not exactly on the subject but a general suggestion.

Having read tons on ATI vs. GeForce over the years and also having read tons on Pentiums vs. AMDs, including P4s vs. Athlons I can tell you with great conviction that:

GeForce + Pentium is an unbeatable combination if you can afford the $$$. Why? Because even though GeForce may be at times a bit slower than ATIs of the same class and Pentium a bit slower than Athlon of the same class, in general GeForce and Pentium don't have any compatibility problems with anything and they also have much greater stability. Personally, I will trade 3-5% in extra performance for extra 20% in stability any time...