RADEON 7500 Under $200

The ATI/NVIDIA battles continue and, for consumers, it continues to be a good thing. A little healthy competition keeps vendors on their toes by having to work at making superior products. Competition can also have a positive effect on pricing, as we learned this week from ATI. The company just announced that the RADEON 7500 graphics board is now shipping in North America at a manufacturers' suggested retail price of $199. The card, which Tom says looks like pretty decent competition for NVIDIA's GeForce 2 MX line, is ready to roll with Windows XP when it arrives. If you buy a RADEON 7500 now, you can download XP drivers from ATI as soon as the OS hits the streets. The RADEON 7500 has a core clock speed of 290MHz and a memory clock speed of 230MHz, 64MB DDR, and uses ATI's HYPER Z technology to boost effective memory bandwidth by 20 percent. ATI says the RADEON 7500 can access up to 8.8GB/sec of effective memory bandwidth and gives you up to a 60 percent improvement in performance compared to previous RADEON processors. The RADEON 7500 also features multiple-display support and runs under Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000, along with providing support for DirectX 8.0 and OpenGL 1.2. The RADEON 7500 will be available worldwide beginning October 1.