We had a difficult time finding a Unitech Optimus 8500 eXP street price, as the retailers we found carrying the card were not located in North America. We actually held this review back hoping for a bit more representation on this side of the pond, but it failed to materialize. Based on this, we could only estimate the relative positioning of the Optimus 8500 eXP. This ends up being at a slight price premium over some of the other Radeon 8500 128-MB cards from Power Color, Gigabyte or some of the other ATI partners, but the extra MHz, game/application bundle and VIVO functionality can make the higher price more than worth it. This is especially true for those who want basic video-in with their ATI card, but don't want to fork over the cash for an All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500.
The Unitech Optimus 8500 eXP is certainly an impressive video card, and whose main impact has been to show that ATI cards can really compete against all levels of the NVIDIA steamroller. Along with high-end performance and a 300 MHz core speed, the Optimus 8500 eXP also caters to the general user with VIVO functionality and a game/application bundle that rivals the best GeForce4 Ti 4600 cards. Sadly, availability is not high, which is unfortunate since this card could give ATI fans some much-needed bragging rights. We are also hoping that this is only the tip of the iceberg, and that ATI will continue to let their 3rd-party manufacturers have some leeway with clock and memory speeds.
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