No, ATI seems to be unable to agree upon anything with its partners making graphics cards. Sometimes, the product specs are kind of confusing, which doesn’t make any positive contribution to ATI’s image. For example, the other day there appeared a graphics card in Japanese stores with a proud "Radeon 8500" name on the colorful box. The card is selling for around $163-$173.

Although a bit below there is a small sticker specifying: "Radeon 8500LE", which automatically reduces the chip and memory frequencies down to 250Mhz and 250MHz DDR (the real RADEON 8500 works at 275MHz and 275MHz DDR respectively). Do you think that’s it? No, no way! In fact, the actual working frequency of the chip makes … only 230MHz, and the memory chips integrated onto the graphics card PCB (on the reverse side of it) feature 5ns access time, which corresponds to 200MHz DDR.

Well, this appears to be some kind of Radeon 8500LELE! And this nice toy costs $160-$170, while the average Radeon 8500LE (according to Pricewatch) sells at some $140-$150. frankly speaking, it is not what we expected Gigabyte to do, even though the card is intended for the OEM market. The pictures illustrating this story are available here.

So, ATI definitely has to do something about it, just like NVIDIA did one day: now you will hardly find a lot of graphics cards from the more or less well-known makers with the chip and memory frequencies lying below those recommended by NVIDIA.