LOSTCIRCUITS

All tests were done in the following system configuration

• ASUS A7V266-E
• AMD Athlon XP1900+
• FIC Radeon 8500 OEM (7206 drivers)
• ASUS V8200T5 GeForce3 Ti500 (22.80 drivers)
• MSI 822 Starforce GeForce3
• 1 x 256 MB Mushkin High Performance PC2100 DDR
• IBM GPX 60 20G HDD
• Pioneer 12 x DVDROM
• SMC 9332BDT
• Win 98 (First Edition)

Overclocking

In its standard configuration, the FIC Radeon was kind of reluctant to function at frequencies higher than 260 / 260 MHz. Symptoms were triangles flashing over the screen and vertex lines being blacked out. In most cases like this, the culprit is the memory. Note that the Radeon uses 8 memory chips without any heat spreaders and with additional components spaced in between, making it impossible to use any of the standard heat spreaders. In addition, the 8 chips are on both sides of the PCB so that even in the best case, a minimum of 4 heat spreaders is necessary.

After mounting the heat sinks shown, the FIC Radeon gained second wind and would run all applications up to 282 MHz core / memory speed. The only glitch that occurred was that after going into stand-by (video-off) mode, the refresh rate was scrambled, leading to the typical vertically divided screen. I will have an article on the detailed making of the heatsinks in the next few days.

First Impressions

The first impression of the Radeon 8500 is the most difficult to document and that is image quality and sharpness. Briefly, (because this is very subjective), if the original Radeon had excellent image quality, the Radeon 8500 surpasses it. Again, quite a bit depends on the monitor used and other factors but overall the image quality is plain and simply breathtaking (flame me for that one or else look at the article on Tech Report and see what Dr. Damage has to say about trilinear filtering and anisotropic filtering).

next page:    => Gaming Performance / Low Resolution, a Waste? =>