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Should a '9200' Brand Mean a 9200 GPU?

Posted by Cliff on from the false-advertising dept.

newsdee asks: "An enormous controversy is going on at the X1000 forums over laptop parts. Some Centrino-based laptops bear a label advertising the Mobility Radeon 9200 brand, but users have found out that the laptop actually contains the 9000 chip. The list of affected machines is as follows: Compaq Presario X1000, HP Pavilion ZT3000 and the HP Compaq NX7000. ATI's and HP's response have been that the label is promising performance and not a specific chip. Yet users seem to not like this at all, apparently because most of them define 'brand' as equating to product. According to reviews, there are no differences (same scores, same clock speed) between the chips other than AGP 8x support, which the Centrino chipset does not provide. I seem to remember that this is not the first time that this kind of thing has happened in PC hardware. Can anybody share insights of whether this is right or wrong? Should I complain about my 9000 chip that delivers what the 9200 brand promises, knowing it has not been overclocked?"

1 of 435 comments (clear)

  1. ATI by devphaeton · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    In my experience, ATI rehashes and re-uses elements of their video card names frequently. Even the names of old, obsoleted chips will get reused years later on something new and completely different.

    If it makes anyone feel any better, i recently tried hunting down a video driver for a customer's machine... Win2K identified the driver as a RAGE 128 PRO, the part number on one side of the card identified it as an Xpert 2000, and the part number on the other side of the card identified it as a 3rd party clone using licensed ATI parts/design. Also, it would not accept any of the drivers on ATI's site- We ended up replacing the card with something we knew we had the correct driver for.

    Also, my test box at home is a K6-II with an old ATI card in it. Solaris identifies it as a RAGE PRO TURBO. Various implementations of XFree86 and/or lspci have identified it as such:
    Xpert 98
    Xpert 99
    Xpert @ Play
    Xpert @ Work
    Rage Pro II
    Rage Pro Turbo
    Rage Pro Turbo II
    Rage Plus
    Rage Ultra

    Maybe I am just a retard and can't identify a piece of hardware correctly, but maybe the model of card that is being reported on some of these laptops is incorrect vs. the actual set of chips?

    Fwiw, i think ATI is teh h4rd suX.

    ymmv.

    hth.

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