ATI Radeon 8500
Manufacturer - ati.com

Just a few weeks ago we tested ATI's Radeon 7500 and hey .. great card great value. That product is targeted against the GeForce3 Ti200. Today we are going to take an in-depth look at the Radeon 7500's big brother, the Radeon 8500.

This particular graphics card is powered with an exceptionally fast graphics core and all the latest technology you can dream about. With a slightly cheaper price tag than NVIDIA's flagship the GeForce3 Ti500 can this product deliver 'the goods' ? Will it be competitive enough ? Have the unfortunate drivers been optimised and are they stable on most platforms ? Let's find out .. but first let's take a look on what new technology the Radeon 8500 harbors compared to the previous Radeon models in our ATI Radeon 8500 review.

The Radeon 8500 chip is fabricated in a .15 micron process and the resulting core and memory speeds have been drastically increased from the previous Radeon generation of graphic cards. The graphics board is powered by one of the most competitive graphics processors currently available. It is operating at a core clock speed of 275 MHz (megahertz) and a memory clock speed of 275 MHz. Equipped with 64MB of DDR (double data rate) memory this videocard is most certainly looking promising as it is capable to utilize a very high level of memory bandwidth. Performance wise this product is targeted towards the GeForce3 Ti500 and us selling for a suggested 299 USD MSRP.

Connectivity wise the Radeon 8500 is a very feature rich videocard. It sports multiple/dual monitor output in the form of one VGA output, one DVI output and TV-Out. ATI delivers a DVI gender changer with the card so that you can hook up two VGA monitors to the videocard.

Great connectivity options