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Every product
that comes through our doors gets a good "once over" before
we install it into our test rigs and begin testing.
What do you say we get up close and personal with the Apollo
Graphics Devil Monster II Radeon 8500 LE first?.
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Quality
of
the Apollo Graphics Devil Monster II Radeon 8500
LE |
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Very Snazzy... |
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As soon as we
opened the Devil Monster's box, we were very excited.
The first few ATi built Radeon's to enter the H.H. labs were
equipped with a basic GPU cooler and did not have any RAM
cooling solutions at all but not the Devil Monster II!
Although Apollo
Graphics is new to us and we haven't seen enough of their
product line to make a blanket statement about their build
quality, we were very impressed with the craftsmanship of
the Devil Monster II Radeon 8500 LE. The cooler
mounted to the front of the card is comprised of one large
piece of aluminum and covers the GPU and the RAM installed
on the front of the card. The fan was quiet and pushed
a fair amount of air over the heat sink's fins. On the
back of the card, there are also two individual heat sinks
mounted to the four remaining RAM chips. One thing
that we were surprised to see is that, although this card is
equipped with 128MB of RAM, it is not using the newer BGA
packaging found on the ATi built Radeon 8500. Because
of this, the RAM is clocked 20MHz. lower than the ATi built
card. The Devil Monster II Radeon 8500 LE is also
equipped with TV-Out and dual monitor outputs, one analog
and one DVI. Should you want to use dual analog
monitors, Apollo Graphics has you covered as well.
Instead of shipping with a more common DVI-to-Analog adapter
a secondary back plate is included that connects to a
header on the card via a ribbon cable.
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Quality
of
the ATi Radeon 8500 LE |
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BGA Memory... |
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The ATi Built
Radeon 8500 LE is a little more non-descript. With the
exception of the BGA packaged RAM, there is very little to
report on. The card's design is very similar to
the original Radeon 8500 Dave reviewed, when it launched
back in October. Because the card is designed and
built by ATi themselves, the craftsmanship and build quality
is very high. The GPU cooler is very basic, and
unfortunately is mounted using thermal epoxy. We would
have preferred it mounted using spring clips and thermal
paste like the Apollo card. Our card was equipped with
a single monitor connector as well as TV-Out.
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Quality
of
the NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti 4200 |
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Much Smaller than
the 4600... |
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We won't dwell
too much on the GeForce 4 Ti 4200 because our sample was a
reference card that will not be available at retail but
there are some very interesting things we want to point out.
First is that size of the card. It's the same size as
a GeForce 2 Ultra, which is about an inch shorter than the
GeForce 4 Ti 4400 and 4600s we have here in the lab.
Even the cooler is recycled from previous GeForce
generations. Another interesting aspect is that the
RAM is not in BGA packaging like the other GeForce 4 Tis.
The Ti 4200 is also dual-monitor capable and is equipped
with DVI and analog monitor connectors as well as TV-Out.
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Installation and
Drivers |
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Anyone can do
this... |
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