- Feb 17, 2002
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I picked up a Radeon 8500LE 128MB (retail, built by ATI) from Best Buy in Mississauga yesterday (a Canadian hot deal, is this a first?), and had some trouble getting it hooked up at first. I installed it in my home PC to test it out before it goes into my main machine at school. Being lazy, I simply uninstalled the drivers of the GeForce 3 that was in there, and put in the newest ATI drivers from Rage3d.com ... the machine would crash within seconds of any 3d game - fear of the infinite loop bug washed over me like a flash flood hitting a hillside village. However, being the computer geek that I am, I merely searched some forums, and found a plethora of suggestions for getting Radeon 8500 cards to work, many of which didn't work for most people but I decided to give it a shot anyways.
So, I went into my BIOS and disabled everything extra in AGP: fast-writes, side-bands, etc. and finally had to lower it down to AGP 2X mode. I have run it for about 3 hours now with zero problems with both the drivers that came with the card (I forget the version #) and the 6166 drivers. I overclocked the card to Radeon 8500 levels (275/275) and have zero problems whatsoever. I also get a nicer 3dmark 2k1SE score and better UT2k3 speed with this card. I really like this card, as I was looking for a 128MB card with similar performance to my GF3 to handle newer games large texture sizes. However, I am concerned that I have to run it on AGP 2X - I know that there is no performance difference, but why does it have to be so? Every nVidia card I have ran runs with all of the goodies on on all of my machines: fast-writes, AGP 4X, etc ... I'm not going to test this card on this machine any further as I am going to school very soon and installing it on my P4; I'll check back here to see if anyone has any suggestions for this machine for why I have to turn off these AGP features in the BIOS on this machine.
This is the machine I am testing this on:
Athlon XP 1800+
Epox 8K-7A motherboard (AMD 761)
256MB Crucial DDR
350W generic PS
15GB Seagate HD
I am interested because I might want to get another 8500LE for this machine down the road.
Any suggestions would be great.
So, I went into my BIOS and disabled everything extra in AGP: fast-writes, side-bands, etc. and finally had to lower it down to AGP 2X mode. I have run it for about 3 hours now with zero problems with both the drivers that came with the card (I forget the version #) and the 6166 drivers. I overclocked the card to Radeon 8500 levels (275/275) and have zero problems whatsoever. I also get a nicer 3dmark 2k1SE score and better UT2k3 speed with this card. I really like this card, as I was looking for a 128MB card with similar performance to my GF3 to handle newer games large texture sizes. However, I am concerned that I have to run it on AGP 2X - I know that there is no performance difference, but why does it have to be so? Every nVidia card I have ran runs with all of the goodies on on all of my machines: fast-writes, AGP 4X, etc ... I'm not going to test this card on this machine any further as I am going to school very soon and installing it on my P4; I'll check back here to see if anyone has any suggestions for this machine for why I have to turn off these AGP features in the BIOS on this machine.
This is the machine I am testing this on:
Athlon XP 1800+
Epox 8K-7A motherboard (AMD 761)
256MB Crucial DDR
350W generic PS
15GB Seagate HD
I am interested because I might want to get another 8500LE for this machine down the road.
Any suggestions would be great.