8500 Chinese Review Driver Question

[Quadzilla]

The Chinese review had the driver version listed as "5.13.1.3272" Rage 3D has 5.13.1.3271 avail for download. My question is whether or not the Chinese site used the shipping driver or the official driver that will ship on the 25th or just an older driver? Hopefully the answer is no and we will see a performance increase in a newer driver release that reviewers like Anand and others will receive. Also, that Chinese site used pre-production hardware (A12 stepping more than likely instead of the shipping A13) that was underclocked by default at 250/250 as opposed to the shipping 275/275. Thoughts, comments??


{ZUG} Quadzilla
Shazbot!

 

[AndyHui]

Link?

 

[MoobyTheGoldenCalf]

http://www.hardsalon.com/opennews.asp?page=1&zhuti=1995&kid=1

 

[AndyHui]

Ah crap...simplified Chinese. This will take a little longer for me to translate on the fly...hold on...

 

[AndyHui]

Here we go...

"I will not reveal the name of the manufacturer (they are a Tier 1 Taiwan manufacturer that has produced many killer products....anybody guessed who they are?)...they have sent me the results of their internal testing of 3DMark 2001, including the ATI Radeon 8500 and the soon to be released nVidia Titanium series."

System configuration....

The following table shows the card and the drivers used....

The table shows overclocked speeds. We looked at the WinME results 1st...

The manufacturer claims that its Radeon 8500 card will use a special design to facilitate overclocking with tested speeds reaching 290/285MHz. Here are the results for Win2K....

The Radeon 8500 and the Ti 500 are an even match under WinME, but the Radeon falls behind under Win2K....waiting for progress on Radeon 8500 drivers.

The rest is fluff about pricing and attractiveness of the other Ti cards.