Radeon 8500 gets [H]ard look

KYLE B at Hard OCP has reviewed the Radeon 8500 with benchmarks'n'all. He had some problems with matching it with an AthlonXP using DirectX 8 - there are workarounds. But he says the drivers for the Radeon 8500 are "far from perfect" and he expresses shock that they're described as fully tested. ATi has some work to do, he thinks, if Nvidia isn't going to trample all over them.

At Ace's there's more about the McKinley presentation, which we reported earlier in the week. Ace's also points to some Northwood benchmarks which we were going to mention separately - but you may as well go there to click the links. They're tested with 845 chipsets which aren't going to set the world on fire.

Via Hardware tells me that Scott Thirlwell, who I had a nice drink with in Finchley Road a month or so back, is leaving Abit to join DFI. Drop us a line Scott. Via HW also points to a Via P4X-266 review. As far as we know, people reviewing them won't get writs from Intella. You can find our own one here.

There's a long piece about the Microprocessor Forum - which incredibly we've never had a chance to visit yet -- over at Tom's HWG. The forum was "very badly attended", the site says, so much so that there were drinks going free because of a shortage of journalists (hack lack).

There's also a report on the Microprocessor Forum over at Extremetech. µ