gdjacobs wrote:Carlos S. M. wrote:Well, an 8500 LE is just an underclocked 8500, so you can OC and in the most of the cases, you'll get full 8500 perfomance (not all cards are the same though)
The GPU will usually overclock well but the RAM might not.
^this.
Unfortunatly 90% of 8500LE cards use 4ns memory clocked at 500Mhz. The normal 8500 uses 3.6ns ram clocked at 550MHz. The core will go over 275 on most cards, but the ram usually overclocks 10-15mhz w/o artifacts... I don't like to OC my retro stuff anyway so I'm fine with it.

Top: 275 core / 550 MHz vram radeon 8500 built by ATi - 3.6ns Hyinx RAM
Bottom: 250 core / 500 Mhz vram radeon 8500LE by hercules (untested card) - uses hyinx 4ns ram.
P.S. - the hacked-up cooler job is not my doing 😒 Luckily I have a dead hercules geforce 3 ti200 I can scavenge a similar fan off.
TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:I actually wonder why the 8500 is so rare, it looks almost as hard to find as a GeForce256
Dunno - I tough it's a local thing, but it turns out it's more widespread. 8500LE cards are more common, (more common then Geforce 256 cards anyway) but the regular 8500 is silly hard to find. Maybe they didn't sell well. The 8500 is a fast card for it's time tough.
Same story with the 9700 pro - very hard to come by. I've only seen two 9700 pro and one 9500 card ever. I've seen more 8500LE cards tough. The 7500 seems to be pretty rare too. I've yet to come across a working card. I had one back in the day, and they were around. Not nearly as common as geforce 2 cards, but I knew a few people who had them.