The board
The FIC Radeon board spots the exact same design as ATI’s reference design.
The ATI heatsink you see in this review was covered with a FIC sticker, which
points out that this is actually an original ATI RADEON board.
The FIC RADEON features
64MB of DDR SDRAM manufactured by Hynix and rated at 3.6ns. The memory is
set in an 8 x 8MB configuration over the front and back sides of the PCB.
On the outside panel,
you find three different output ports, 15PIN standard monitor output for use
with your main display, DVI-I that can be used as a secondary monitor output
for multi monitor with your digital flat panel screen or a standard 15-PIN
monitor using the DVI-I to 15PIN included adapter and at last comes the S-VIDEO
output for use with your TV.The TV-Out is implemented via ATI Rage Theater
chip.
An interesting feature on the 8500 is its support for multi-monitor configurations.
ATI made a step ahead with their RADEON 8500 and implanted multi-monitor support
making it the first truly gaming chip with this feature, I think its time
for nVidia to take example of this.
The RADEON 8500 features new and improved technologies in addition to the
old ones on the original RADEON board, TRUFORM, SMARTSHADER, SMOOTHVISION
and HYPER Z II are some of them. We will give you a closer look into these
technologies in an upcoming article focused on the RADEON 8500 Chip.
