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'OEM' Radeon 8500

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  • Graphics Cards
  • OEM
  • Radeon
  • Graphics
Last response: in Graphics & Displays
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Anonymous
a b U Graphics card
January 17, 2002 9:31:52 PM

I'm looking into getting an OEM Radeon 8500 card (far cheaper). My question is the OEM cards' memory only runs at 550Mhz (DDR), can this card be 'made to' perform as well as, if not better than, the stock, retail version with the faster ram?

More about : oem radeon 8500

January 17, 2002 9:38:31 PM

Possibly. The LELE (230/240) and the LE (250/250, like you're talking about) can be flashed to the retail BIOS, if (and that's a big if) they have the 3.6ns RAM. I have the BIOS flash files if you want to try it. It can be easily flashed back if it doesn't work right.

The difference between the 230/240 and the 275/275 (retail) is about 400 points in 3DMark 2001, from one review I saw. Not as big a difference as the clock speed would suggest.

<font color=orange>Quarter</font color=orange> <font color=blue>Pounder</font color=blue> <font color=orange>Inside</font color=orange>
January 17, 2002 9:49:52 PM

I've been playing around with overclocking and underclocking my Radeon 8500 and my Athlon and I have come to a couple of conclusions:

The Radeon 8500 is severly bottenecked by the CPU. I don't know if this a driver issue or what, but I know that running a Radeon 8500 on an Athlon less than 1GHz is pointless in comparison to a GeForce3 Ti200 on a similar system. I have also found that the Radeon 8500's clock does indeed improve performance significantly but you'll need an extremely fast processor to notice the clock speed difference of the Radeon 8500. From benchmarks I've been seeing also around the web, the Radeon 8500 seems to favour the Athlon (XP) platform over the P4 platform. More Athlon systems have high marks in 3DMark2001 with the Radeon 8500 than with a P4. I don't know what that means exactly, but that seems to be the case. I have a feeling it might be a driver optimization problem. The Radeon 8500 drivers are stressing the CPU (using up more cycles) more than they should.

AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor
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Anonymous
a b U Graphics card
January 17, 2002 10:16:53 PM

How do I tell if the card has 3.6ns ram or not? What are the marking differences or do you know? I'm in the electronics industry so you can be blunt.
January 17, 2002 10:23:37 PM

I'm not completely sure, but check on the RAM chips on the card itself. You should be able to tell from there, but I'm not sure exactly what to look for.

<font color=orange>Quarter</font color=orange> <font color=blue>Pounder</font color=blue> <font color=orange>Inside</font color=orange>
January 18, 2002 5:44:44 AM

Umm I have an Ati Radeon 8500 OEM with 4ns Ram default clocks were 250/250.
Flashed it and now using retail bios 275/275. and no problems card is stable!
January 18, 2002 5:36:25 PM

The ones sold at newegg.com have (or at least had last month) the 3.6 ns Ram.

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January 18, 2002 6:14:07 PM

The thing is that 3.6ns means nothing in terms of stability at 275MHz. I have heard that many people with OEM Radeon 8500 were unable to run their card stably at 275MHz. OEM Radeon 8500s may simply be flawed retail Radeon 8500s.

AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor
January 18, 2002 11:36:13 PM

huh? Why did you go off topic juin? I know the P4 is currently faster than the Athlon XP.

AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor
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