ATI Radieon graphics cards

[Kronos]

How do you guys rate them?  Any good?

Im thinking about getting the 128meg 8500? series one I think it is.

[Animal]

It is a good card, though I'd recomend a Geforce 4 Ti4200 for that pricerange.

But if you can go higher end, get a Radeon 9700 and be the happiest gamer on your town (for about three months)

[Pongo]

I have the radeon 8500 with 64megs. and I think animal is correct. I should have gone for a 4200 gforce 4 I think.

[Newman]

I HAVE the 8500/128. I LOVE it!

 Upgraded from a GeForce 2 GTS Pro/ 64 MEG. I looked long and hard at the 4200 as well, and went for the 8500. Granted, it benches just a little less than a 4200, but in AH I average 80-90 FPS, and it optimizes DX8.1, the 4200 isn't.

Runs dual monitors (adaptors included) without slowing down either!

I'll post numbers if ya like.

Newman

[Hussein]

The 8500 however is such an old card already that it's not logical to buy one if you want any kind of longevity for your purchase.

If you play only AH it might be a good choice though.

[fullback]

I have an 8500LE 128MB DDR (installed in an 1800+XP, 512 DDR RAM system) and I'm quite satisfied with it. It's smooth for me and I can ramp up resolution to 1280x1024 with frame rates no less than monitor refresh.

The main reason I like it is because I'm no longer required to search for, download, uninstall, reinstall then tweak the latest Detonator Driver - only to find it doesn't work.

Then doing it all over again with the older driver that didn't work - but didn't work a little better than the latest one that didn't work.

[SKurj]

depends what else you play besides AH Kronos...

DO some research as far as your favourite games, and your next game purchases are concerned.

A friend runs a 128mb radeon 8500, and my gf4 mx 440 is faster and prettier in JK2 and BF1942 (only 2 games I have done a direct comparison of)  BF 1942 is almost a real problem for him.

(Note.. he running one of those Ali chipsets though...)



SKurj

[-lynx-]

fullback - that's a sense of false security you've developed there. nVidia wipes the floor with ATI as far as drivers support is concerned - I know, used to have Radeon 64DDR. But as for "no need to look for drivers with ATI" I'll give you my own example - Crucial 9700Pro with stock drivers (.6143) only yielded 7500 or so 3DMarks2001SE, virtually the same as my old Hercules GF3 Ti500 it replaced. The next generation (.6166) put things to rights with just under 10K 3DMarks with all other components unchanged. That's 30% increase in performance just by updating drivers.

p.s. Here, in the UK 9000Pro and 8500Le 128MB are much more competitively priced than comparable Ti4200s... I went for 9000Pro for my wife's new rig cuz Crucial were out of stock on 8500s. 9000Pro with 64MB and fansink was just £66 - ~$100. And that's realy cheap for the card of this quality. The cheapest GF4 Ti4200 is ~£100...

[Skuzzy]

lynx,..what you are saying about driver support is not really true any longer.

Both NVidia and ATI have had recent bone head drivers released.  In driver support they are pretty equal today.

And if you only got 7500 3dmarks with the original 9700pro drivers then you had something seriously wrong with some other software component in your system.  I had the original drivers and got over 12K, which has improved to 13K or so.

Every NVidia person who has moved to the 9700Pro had a lot of problems initially.  All associated with not being able to clean out the old NVidia drivers.  This is not uncommon in the video card industry, but I know if you have to be sure your NVidia drivers are gone, it requires a third party utility to do so.
I usually edit the registry manually when switching from or to either NVidia or ATI, due to this problem.