That's incorrect! That's the Ramdac, which is missing on the late versions of the card, apparently. Not a good indicator in my experience. I have two 8500s that don't have it, one is a Powercolor Evil Master (cute red fan), the other one is an Ati Reference made in china, and both are 275/275. Earlier in this thread I posted a 8500 LE that does have the Ramdac, but that is 250/250. I also have a 8500 Sapphire with red pcb from a 9100 that doesn't have the Ramdac but has 3.6ns memories and is 275/275. Best indication of the clock is the type of ram they have. 4ns = LE, 3.5 or 3.6ns = "pro", 3.3ns = "xt". But like you said, sometimes they did mix bad GPUs with binned memories and vice versa. For example from an italian forum they say they exist 250/275, 250/285, 230/275, 275/285. And even LELE versions, as people called them, like 230/250. But these are easy to spot as they have a low profile PCB.

Edit: also forgot I have a Club3D 9100 that has no Ramdac and is 275/275 (128mb)

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-10-30, 16:07:

Ati Radeon 8500 XT. Made in Canada. 64mb, 300/300mhz. Hopefully it works. It's from ebay so it's "tested" with the air quotes. And hopefully Agp4Life is wrong about these 😜

Just FYI, there is no 8500 XT, officially. As far as I can tell, this and this are the only pages that mentioned such a card back in the day.

GPU spec sites probably auto-populated a page for it based on... who knows what... so they list it (usually as "never released") and they show a generic picture of an 8500\8500LE. A few of them probably exist somewhere, but they aren't an official designation by ATi and were never released. Sort of like the various dual-GPU ATi cards that were shown off by board partners but never hit retail.

It does make it confusing though when you do an image search of an 8500LE and TechPowerup tells you it's some incredibly rare variant because they used an incorrect placeholder image.

To further confirm this - XT branding wasn't a thing until 9600, 9700 and 9800, and even then I'm not sure if 9700 had a XT SKU. 9600 and 9800 did, however.

9700 didnt get the XT treatment only the 9600 and 9800.

Some vendors used "pro" and afaik "xt" too. But I only know Powercolor did for sure, because of this pic.

Gigabyte used XT Ultra for the 300/300
And just Deluxe for the 275/275

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-10-31, 00:55:

Some vendors used "pro" and afaik "xt" too. But I only know Powercolor did for sure, because of this pic.

"Evil Master II" 🤣

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-10-31, 01:20:

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-10-31, 00:55:

Some vendors used "pro" and afaik "xt" too. But I only know Powercolor did for sure, because of this pic.

"Evil Master II" 🤣

THE 2000s WERE WILD 🤣

you can get a Fire Gl 8800 version of the Radeon 8500 that is 300/300, its not a bad card but its OpenGl is broken to hell and back and ATI never fixed it, the Radeon 8500 doesnt suffer from this OpenGl issue but you cant use the Radeon Drivers on the 8800 as it bricks OpenGl totally and itll crash teh PC every time it tries to run.

Drove me crazy till I started diging and its a know issue with the 8800, not sure what ATI changed but Radeon Drivers wont work correctly for it.

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-10-31, 01:18:

Gigabyte used XT Ultra for the 300/300
And just Deluxe for the 275/275

That Gigabyte card I believe is the only known released 8500XT.

AGP4LIfe? wrote on 2024-10-31, 03:23:

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-10-31, 01:18:

Gigabyte used XT Ultra for the 300/300
And just Deluxe for the 275/275

That Gigabyte card I believe is the only known released 8500XT.

The Fire GL 8800 is a Radeon 8500Xt with 300/300 clocks, some place report 290 for the Vram but every 8800 I have seen runs at 300/300, Rock solid D3D cards too, not so great with OpenGL (When you get it working you lose D3D) but ATI/AMD in general has always been pretty lacklustre for that, even their modern cards get stomped by nVidia for OpenGL.

I wonder how the GL drivers on that Gigabyte card work or if it too has issues with OpenGl behaving badly or not at all.

So, I tested the card. It works, which is a miracle considering it covered the entire width of an hemisphere of the planet in a paper bag.
And unfortunately it's "only" a 275/300. Will be interesting to see if's faster than the 9100 128mb 275/275 that I have.
Also there is the overclocking route for the juicy 300/300. I mean all the other R200s I have can do 300mhz on the core. Hopefully this one won't be different.

New additions to my little retro collection have been rather limited of late due to well lack of anything that takes my interest but I did get two nice GPUs for a silly experiment with XP I am doing and I managed to snag another 2Gb of DDr500 in 4x512Mb sticks.

Always nice to have DDR 500 CL 2.5 4 Sticks @ 512Mb

Technically the last Geforce for XP with modded drivers, got this at a decent price.

This is the Maxwell version of the Titan X so will work under XP with the same drivers the 980ti uses. Both cards are stupid silly overkill for anything XP but like others here sometimes you just want to build a stupidly over powered XP machine and see the old girl fly.

Going to try and get XP running on a 4790k and Z97 I have, will likely have to ditch on board sound and LAN but both are replacable eaisly enough, drivers for other IO might also be tricky but XP should run with enough prodding.

Wish I had more Retro stuff to show but interesting parts have slowed to a trickle or are expensive .. like a nice Athlon FX-57 or Opteron 156. (No idea what the Opty 156 sold for but it was listed at $420ish BID or over $1200 BIN, considering how rare that CPU is it was likely worth far more than the 420 auction starting price.

Yesssss, it’s finally here. Last seen in person about 40 years ago the IBM Floor Standing Option for the 5170 arrived 🎉

The seller did an exceptionally good job packaging the original box and the item, restocking me on bubble wrap for the next five years.

CMB75 wrote on 2024-10-31, 12:16:

Yesssss, it’s finally here. Last seen in person about 40 years ago the IBM Floor Standing Option for the 5170 arrived 🎉

The attachment IBM-FSO-finally-back.jpg is no longer available

The seller did an exceptionally good job packaging the original box and the item, restocking me on bubble wrap for the next five years.

Thats great to hear, sellers who go above and beyond with packing are awesome!

CMB75 wrote on 2024-10-31, 12:16:

Yesssss, it’s finally here. Last seen in person about 40 years ago the IBM Floor Standing Option for the 5170 arrived 🎉

The attachment IBM-FSO-finally-back.jpg is no longer available

The seller did an exceptionally good job packaging the original box and the item, restocking me on bubble wrap for the next five years.

It's unnatural, 5170s are meant to be a huge and ungainly encumbrance on the desk, not a huge and ungainly encumbrance on the floor. 🤣

It's cool, I'm just joking around, "I wish you joy of it" as Jack Aubrey might say, happy toe stubbing.

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-10-31, 01:20:

"Evil Master II" 🤣

Everyone should really be wary of that card, it may be scheming to conquer the world and annihilating humanity. Someone already caught Evil Master I trying the same, and this one is playing the same shenanigans.

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2024-10-31, 16:25:

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-10-31, 01:20:

"Evil Master II" 🤣

Everyone should really be wary of that card, it may be scheming to conquer the world and annihilating humanity. Someone already caught Evil Master I trying the same, and this one is playing the same shenanigans.

Yeah, nice couple. The Pinky and the Brain 😉

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-10-31, 00:55:

Some vendors used "pro" and afaik "xt" too. But I only know Powercolor did for sure, because of this pic.

What I refer to is internal reference chipset/drivers level - up until 9600 and 9800, there was no XT model, and 9700 didn't receive one either, although that's because 9700 came a bit earlier than 9600 and 9800 IIRC.

Added to my collection:

AMD 5k86-P75 AMD-SSA/5-75ABR