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Review: ATI Radeon 64 Meg DDR OEM

by David Ross on 19 August 2000, 00:00

Tags: ATi Technologies (NYSE:AMD)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qaz

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Installation and Testing

Nothing too hard here. I deinstalled my old nvidia drivers properly and went back to std. VGA mode first, before installing the ATI card. All you get with the OEM version is a little booket and a CD. I havn’t used the CD as I downloded later drivers off the net anyway. The card itself is fairly tiny, and although it has a small onboard HSF, it runs cool to the touch so I suspect it is largely cosmetic. The card seems quite happy with my Oced AGP bus (83 mhz) and it all worked fine first time. For the tests here I have not tried to overclock the card as I have read a number of posts saying that there is very little benefit in it.

Two issues I have read about in ATI messageboards which might affect some users. There are some reported cases of instabilities with newer VIA KX and KT boards, which ATI are going to fix with a driver update. I have also read a few horror stories of people who have upgraded from a voodoo card, whose old drivers don’t deinstall properly and make a mess of things. Given it is such a new card, there are surprisingly few reported incompatability problems in general though.

Benchmarks Test System
P3 500e at 620 (124fsb)
ABIT BE6
192 megs RAM at 2,3 timing
Maxtor 7200 RPM drive on ATA66
Soundblaster Live Value with LW3
Windows ME
Cards
Diamond Viper V770 TNT2 with clock set at 147 core, 205 memory
Radeon 64 meg OEM version, clock at default 166/166