Sub-$200 Video Card Roundup - April 2002

ATI's Radeon 8500LE: Let the people have DX8 compatibility

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Unlike the Radeon LE that preceded it, the Radeon 8500LE is an officially sanctioned, retail part from ATI that only differs from its bigger brother in its clock speed (250/250 vs 275/275). The 9% drop in clock speed doesn't hurt performance too much and allows ATI to target the critical sub $200 market with the card. In fact, during ATI's initial press briefing of the Radeon 8500LE it was placed head to head with the few specs that were known about NVIDIA's GeForce4 MX line. The goal was to offer the only DX8 solution in the mainstream market and beat NVIDIA where it counted the most. The Radeon 8500LE would also become the only board in this sector to offer 128MB of DDR SDRAM on-board using BGA packaged memory.

The Radeon 8500LE is currently available and is priced at $199.