best video boards for xfree86

[Mike A. Harris]

On Wed, 22 Oct 2003, Xose Vazquez Perez wrote:

>FireGL 8800
>FireGL 8700
>Radeon 8500 and Radeon 9100
>Radeon 9200
>Radeon 9000
>Radeon 7500
>Radeon 7200 and Radeon 32/64 SDR/DDR
>Radeon 7000 and Radeon VE
>
>Any board or chip with letters _LE_ means *Lower Editon*

LE == "Light Edition" actually.
VE == "Value Edition"

The VE is more or less the 7200 with the TCL unit removed and a 
few other minor changes, at a lower clock speed, but with the 
addition of dualhead (it was the first dualhead Radeon).

The original Radeon LE was made for Asian market and produced by 
a 3rd party company, however these boards made their way back to 
the North American market as well.  The Radeon LE is 100% 
identical to a Radeon 7200 in every way chipwise (regardless of 
any marketing materials or other claims one finds online).  The 
only difference between the Radeon LE and the Radeon 7200 is that 
it has 166Mhz memory in it just like the OEM Radeon 7200, but it 
is intentionally underclocked to 148Mhz or 143Mhz (I don't 
remember exactly), and the BIOS on the card disables the TCL unit 
at BIOS POST time, so that the drivers think it has no TCL 
support.  The card autodetects as a Radeon 7200 however as it 
uses the same PCI ID (because it is the same chip).  Further 
details can probably be found in a web search, however anything 
you read that discounts anything I've said is 100% incorrect.  
;o)

The other LE cards such as 7500LE, 8500LE, etc. are the same as 
their non-LE counterpart except at a lower clock speed of about 
10-15% or so.  I don't remember if they have any other changes or 
not, but I think only the clock speed and perhaps memory speed 
or type of memory was different on them.  That's web searchable 
also.

Some ATI trivia that'll hopefully be useful.  ;o)

-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat