Attacking the GeForce2 MX: ATi's Radeon 32 MB SDRAM

The True Chip Clock - Marketing Versus Reality

ATi has a long tradition concerning the clock rates of older chips such as the Rage Pro, Rage 128 and Rage 128 Pro. Whether marketing papers or press releases, you always found higher clock rates in the specifications compared to what the actual products revealed. With Radeon SDR ATi seems to have picked up this habit once more. ATI announced a chip clock of 166 MHz for the 32 MB DDR as well as the SDR cards. This specification is only valid for the Radeon 32 MB DDR, but not for the SDR boards our Californian and German lab received. Here we could observe the following:

Instead of 166 MHz clock we measure only 159.8 MHz on both SDR test samples.