TR Forums

Anybody tried the new Radeon8500 drivers? I have but i'm gettin a lot of garbled text on the desktop and artifacts in games. Very odd. BTW the driver version in 6052 (winXP)

Yeah Im using them now. They are great. I have no probelms at all in any game I have tried. Ghost Recon,MOHAA, Jedi II, Flashpoint, NFS5, Giants etc. I am also running these problem free with my daughter's 1 gig Tbird, Radeon 7500 combo. I have copper ram sinks installed on my 8500 and I have the board running at 315mhz core and 640mhz ram. My 3d mark is around 9500 1024x768 32 bit with an overlcoked Athlon XP 1800+.

How much do those ramsinks cost? And where can i grab some online?

They are 10 bucks for a set of 4. You'll need two sets (of course) and some good thermal epoxy. I would not use the tape. I used the Artic Silver ceramic epoxy since its not conductive. I would hate for you to burn out your ram because some ooozed out onto the leads. I have had three of the cards the first one died after I did the pencil trick to up the voltage on the ram. It didt like it and I had to remove the epoxied ramsinks. Damn it wasnt easy but they did come off with some effort annd after some serious cleaning I bought a retail card from Fry's and returned the dead card 2 hrs later for a refund All I did really was expidite the swap and eliminate the shipping charges Anyway the two 8500's I have are great. Not one problem in any game at all. Ghost Recon, Giants, Jedi Knight II, Global Ops, MOHAA, NFS5 etc. Man MOHAA and JediII both run 1600x1200 32 bit color and textures all details cranked and the lowest FPS I saw in MOHAA was 45; In JediII the lowest was 69 fps! Who needs Anti A at 1600x1200?
The ram sinks are worth it the highest I could get on the ram before was right under 600 now I get 640. Woohoo.
Doh! Here's where you can get them.
http://www.highspeedpc.com/index.htm?item106.htm
L8ter...

Available a bit cheaper at Sidewinder Computers at $23. I've never used them myself, but they sponsor a lot of the reviews at Mikhailtech. Arctic Alumina Adhesive is the ceramic version of Arctic Silver, and the cheapest I've seen it is at SVCompucycle. Again, haven't ordered from there myself, but it was recommended by a couple of other people in the fora.

2CoolTek sells a different type of ramsink. From the pictures, they look to have more surface area, but I don't know what material they're made from. They are cheaper at $1.50 each (you need the 10x20mm ones for the Radeon 8500 64mb version), but I don't know how they compare performance-wise to the Tweakmonster ramsinks.

Happy overclocking :)

Yeah they have gone up since I purchased mine. I got them for ten bucks per set of 4. I can say they are very heavy high quality copper sinks though. The Ceramic epoxy seems to do a really good job as all the heatsinks are quite warm. Anyway happy cooling.

Dang check it out they have a 30 dollar cooling kit for the 8500.
Crystal orb GPU cooler, ram sinks (may not be copper though)
and some Artic Silver Ceramic Epoxy.

http://2cooltek.safeshopper.com/51/299.htm?221

Back to the 8500 drivers, is there a program like the Detonator Destroyer for the complete removal of nVidia drivers for ATI drivers? Or is upgrading the ATI drivers more straight forward thing?