Testbed and Methods

We were above all interested in overclocking capabilities of Tachyon G9700 PRO, as this graphics card doesn’t differ from the ATI RADEON 9700 PRO reference-card that much, only the cooling system is unique. So what do you buy with this card? Let’s start out with overclocking results.

When you see some product with such an exceptional cooling system, you unconsciously think that this graphics card can be overclocked to an infinite height. Yeah, better cooling does usually help to get higher frequencies.

By default, Tyan Tachyon G9700 PRO works at 325MHz chip and 620MHz memory frequency. These are the standard clock-rates for RADEON 9700 PRO based cards. We could overclock the graphics chip to 385MHz and the memory to 680MHz. Actually, these are not very high results. We had hoped for something more as the RADEON 9700 PRO based card from SAPPHIRE notched 390MHz and 690MHz for core and memory under the same conditions. So, let’s compare the performance of Tyan Tachyon G9700 PRO and SAPPHIRE RADEON 9700 PRO in their regular and overclocked modes.

We used the following testbed:

• Intel Pentium 4 2800MHz CPU;
• ASUS P4PE mainboard;
• 512MB PC2100 RAM;
• IBM DTLA 15GB 7,200rpm HDD;
• 24x CD-ROM;
• OS Windows XP Professional;
• DirectX9.

The software we used:

• Quake3 Arena 1.30;
• Unreal Tournament 2003 Demo;
• AquaMark 2.0;
• 3DMark 2001SE.

The cards were tested with ATI Catalyst 3.0 drivers.

ASUS P4PE mainboard we used in our testbed is based on Intel i845PE chipset and thus doesn’t support AGP 8x. But it doesn’t really matter as long as the two cards were benchmarked under the same conditions. Moreover, according to our tests, AGP 8x doesn’t provide any significant performance growth in today’s applications (see our article called NVIDIA NV18/NV28 and AGP 8x Investigation). All the benchmarks were run without anisotropic filtering and full-screen anti-aliasing.

So, let’s get started.

Performance

Quake3 Arena

Quake3 Arena is an oldie now, but still popular among “first person shooter” fans. It uses OpenGL API and is not very hard on the hardware according to the today’s standards. We set all the game settings to maximum, turned on uncompressed 32-bit textures and tri-linear filtering. Then we ran Four.dm_66.dm3 demo in Timedemo mode.

Tyan Tachyon G9700 PRO loses all the resolutions to SAPPHIRE RADEON 9700 PRO in both overclocked and regular modes. The gap is very small, however, and can be written off to measurements errors.

Unreal Tournament 2003

Unreal Tournament 2003 came out at the end of 2002. It’s a good alternative to Quake3 Arena as concerns benchmarking various system components. It uses Direct3D and features integrated benchmarking means to check graphics card performance. That’s how we set graphics quality settings in this game:

• Texture Detail: Highest;
• World Detail: Highest;
• Character Detail: Highest;
• Physics Detail: High;
• Decal Stay: High.

After that we ran Flyby test in DM-Antalus map.

This benchmark clearly shows advantages of overclocking. Those 5-10MHz we got when overclocking SAPPHIRE RADEON 9700 PRO are crucial in determining the winner.