Thanks again to Hercules who were kind enough to send me a 3D Prophet FDX 8500 LE card for review. I have had this card in my machine for well over a month after suffering from a board failure with my previous AMD system.
A P4, board and some ram later I have been able to enjoy a significant "step-up" from a GeForce 2 GTS and have had lots of fun playing Quake III and Counter-Strike to fully test and get the feel of the card hehe.. While this is in no way a professional hardware review that you might see on some of the more respected hardware sites this is more a look, we look at it have benched it and give our opinion at the end.
- 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 is selling for a suggested €249. (Thats about the same in USD)