ATI Technologies Radeon 8500 Graphics Card

by ATI

Product Details

Product Manual [403kb PDF]

• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0000630TA
• Item model number: 100-431001
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #206,089 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: March 12, 2002

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great value, brute force, March 17, 2002

By 

J. Feng (Cupertino, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: ATI Technologies Radeon 8500 Graphics Card (Personal Computers)

First off let me help you novices out there a little bit. Don't buy a video card because of its price, its hype, or its look, do your research! This card is excellent, it is blazingly fast, (it beats geforce 3), and it is a steal... BR>A key feature in the radeon 8500 is the programmable pixel shaders. Let me tell you a little more about them. Geforce 3, 4 and radeon 8500 all share them witht he exception with the Geforce 4 MX. The newest games will use programmable pixel shaders and if you don't have a video card that uses this, then you can't play it. The radeon beats its competition while being half the price! but be cautious because there has been driver issues with ATI and what seems to be "cheating drivers"

Pros:
blazingly fast
comes from a respectable company
excellent image quality

cons:
driver issues

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Card, Great Price!, November 22, 2002

By 

The Shrike "The Shrike" (Fresno, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: ATI Technologies Radeon 8500 Graphics Card (Personal Computers)

I have had this card for about 6 months now. I got it before the GForce 4 came out and before the Radeon 9700. If your looking to get the MOST for your money this card is the way to go. It's faster then the all the GForce 3's and is just as fast as the GEorce4Ti 4200, for a fraction of the cost. Driver support was an issue in the past as you will read in some of the older reviews of this card, but now ATI has fixed all the driver problems they have had in the past. In fact they have been coming out with drivers faster and of a better quality then Nvidia for about the past six months. If you buy this card I recomend downloading the newest drivers from the ATI website as soon as possible, the new drivers are of MUCH better quality as I said before...

To get the most out of your older games with this card to to your display properties- advanced- Direct3d or openGL, and bump the Anisotropic Filtering up to 16.With little or no performance hit your games will look MUCH better.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars great graphics for the money, October 27, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: ATI Technologies Radeon 8500 Graphics Card (Personal Computers)

great for gaming. With dual head monitor support + DVI & TV out, the 64 MB memory on this Card and the extremely affordable pricepoint make it one of the best options available today. If you are a hard-core CG effects person, this won't be the best option, but otherwise, it is the way to go.