Our testing methods
We last tested the Radeon 8500LE for our massive ATI vs. NVIDIA round-up, and we were flooded with requests—not to mention entreaties, demands, and borderline threats—to re-test with newer ATI drivers. We said we'd revisit the issue in due time, and here we are. We've tested with ATI's 7.67 and 7.70 drivers, plus the new 7.71 drivers in today's CATALYST release.

As ever, we did our best to deliver clean benchmark numbers. Tests were run at least twice, and the results were averaged.

Our test system was configured like so:

We used an ATI Radeon 8500LE (ATI's retail model) card for testing. For comparison, we used a VisionTek Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4200 128MB AGP card with NVIDIA's new 29.42 drivers.

I want to give a big thanks to Corsair for providing us with DDR333 memory for our testing. Their XMS3000 DIMMs allowed us to run the memory on our Shuttle AK35GT2/R test motherboard at CAS2 timings at 166MHz (that's 333MHz DDR, kids). If you're looking to tweak out your system to the max and maybe overclock it a little, Corsair's RAM is definitely worth considering. Using it makes life easier for us as we're dealing with brand-new chipsets and pre-production motherboards, because we don't have to worry so much about stability and compatibility. The stuff flat works.

The test systems' Windows desktops were set at 1024x768 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

• MadOnion 3DMark 2001 SE
• Codecreatures Benchmark Pro
• Serious Sam SE v1.05

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.