Mike A. Harris wrote:
>>Guess which one I bought? Not that I could tell -- I ordered a
>>"ATI Radeon 8500LE 64MB" card from a mail order vendor. There
>>is no information in the distribution channel to indicate what
>>you are getting.
>
>
>And that is not ATIs fault. Complain to the vendor who sold you
>the card. For what it is woth, all "LE" cards are Powered by
>ATI. ATI doesn't make any of them themselves. If I'm not
>mistaken, ATI even has a webpage dedicated to explaining the LE
>boards, or they did at one point anyway.
>
I'm sorry Mike, but I disagree with this statement. I own 3 ATI Radeon
8500 LE 128. All of
these cards are "Built by ATI" cards. How do I know? I had to have
warranty service
on the card I use in one of my Red Hat 8.0 Linux boxes. I went to the
ATI web site and
followed their instructions on identifying my card. I discovered by
visual inspection of the
card that the part number for this board is 1028280600 which is a "Built
by ATI" card.
Indeed I received excellent "Built by ATI" warranty service!
In addition I just now checked the two cards I have in my Windoze boxes
where I ran the
ATI provided utility (see
http://mirror.ati.com/support/drivers/misc/atiadapterutil.html)
on those boxes. In both cases these cards come up with a "Graphics Card
Manufacturer"
of "ATI Technologies, Inc." as they should for cards which according to
the ATI web site
are "Built by ATI". The utility also shows the BIOS P/N of 113-82802-102
which from
the ATI web site corresponds to the same 1028280600 part number I
visually found
on the defective board. So unless ATI is treating some LE cards as
"Built by ATI" even
though they are not, I claim I have 3 "Built by ATI" LE cards.
Perhaps what is of interest is Q4 of the web page you mentioned
(http://www.ati.com/support/products/pc/radeon/radeonle.html) which I am
reiterating here:
Q4. Is the RADEON LE manufactured by ATI?
A4: The RADEON LE is designed by ATI and manufactured by ATI's strategic
partners.
Note that the LE boards are "designed by ATI". Therefore I claim ATI
treats these LE boards just as if
they were manufactured by ATI. My point here is simply that ATI designed
the board and so it
really doesn't matter what third party manufacturers it. They would have
had to follow the parts list which
would have been part of the ATI design. Therefore, there should be no
surprises as far as drivers go.
FWIW two of my boards came in usual ATI red/black box packaging just as
all "Built by ATI" products.
One was bought retail from Best Buy and one was bought mail order. The
third board was an
ATI OEM card bought mail order. I have never had any problem with the
board in my Linux box either
running the XFree86 3D drivers or ATIs own drivers. My guess is the poor
bloke who
had a problem probably received some other third party board advertised
as an ATI Radeon 8500 LE
board but whose design was not actually the ATI design.
--
Paul (ganci@amrone.org)
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