For me, the worst thing about owning a Rad8500 the latest months has not been any of the usual complaints (no vsync, refresh rate, incompability) and so on. No, my card has performed great since day one. However, downloading the newest drivers has been a real pain in the butt! Waiting for days on hosed servers crawling at 5Kb/s is not acceptable. Well, ATI has really gotten their act together. Yesterday I downloaded the DX9 parts at 1 Mb/s, today I got Cat 2.4 at 700Kb/s. I hope it stays this way, for me thats a big part of good customer support.
As a side note I have to give credit to the community for mirroring and spreading the goods when ATI has failed to deliver in the past.
The conclusion is, my 8500 is growing to be one of my all time favourite hardware items. Performance to prize is outstanding, latest driver releases are near perfection (just a few issues left) and now I can download them just hours after release at good speed. Thanks ATI.
/R
As a side note I have to give credit to the community for mirroring and spreading the goods when ATI has failed to deliver in the past.
The conclusion is, my 8500 is growing to be one of my all time favourite hardware items. Performance to prize is outstanding, latest driver releases are near perfection (just a few issues left) and now I can download them just hours after release at good speed. Thanks ATI.
/R
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