This week, some Japanese stores started selling (in limited quantities though) ATI RADEON 8500 graphics cards with even slower clocking than that of RADEON 8500 LE. Despite the fact that these strange graphics cards do not differ from the regular RADEON 8500 based ones in their exterior (they are equipped with 3.6ns DDR SDRAM memory and feature D-Sub, DVI and TV-Out connectors). They are marked as RADEON 8500LE, however, their core and memory work at 230MHz. It is even more surprising that they are selling for the same money as the common RADEON 8500 working at 250MHz frequency.
Unfortunately, we have to state once again that ATI is trying to mislead the customers another time, offering graphics cards working at different frequencies under the same brand name. It is far not the first time that we see this Canadian company do such kind of things. Therefore, the only thing we could advise you is to be very attentive when buying ATI graphics cards and check their working frequencies. Moreover, you should also bear in mind that all the frequencies are always in order by the retail versions of ATI graphics cards: the confusion may occur only with the OEM pieces.
Well, we can only guess what pushed ATI to release graphics cards with 230MHz core and memory frequencies instead of 250MHz. Maybe ATI is still having some problems with the manufacturing technology resulting into a number of chipsets, which fail to work at 250MHz. However, it is also quite possible that the retail stores somehow got hold of a small supply made specifically upon the request of some OEM customer. Anyway, it is no good on ATI’s part...
You can see the photos of the notorious RADEON 8500 on this Japanese page.