by Michail Djagterev
03/30/2003 | 01:41 PM
Graphics processing units from ATI have come into production lines of many graphics card makers now. Not only the giants of the industry, like Gigabyte, but also other companies, less known in this field, enter the market with their own version of a RADEON based card. Thus, TYAN is mostly known for its server platforms, but recently the company has become a player in the graphics cards market. As you know from our previous reviews, TYAN introduced its first graphics card last summer. That one was based on ATI RADEON 9000 Pro (see our article called ATI RADEON 9000 Pro: TYAN Tachyon G9000 Graphics Card Review). Today we are going to deal with another member of the Tachyon series. It’s TYAN Tachyon G9700 PRO card based on ATI RADEON 9700 Pro graphics chip.
<%BANNER[article]%>You know, one of the simplest ways to make a graphics card “special” without re-designing its PCB is to mount a big and nice-looking cooler onto the graphics chip :). Yeah, a big cooler usually doesn’t require any modification of the circuitry, while the overall card appearance becomes much more impressive. So, those users who dream about overclocking the graphics chip and getting some extra fps in 3D games may succumb to the temptation and buy such a card. What would they buy? Let’s check it out with the help of TYAN Tachyon G9700 Pro.
The retail version of the TYAN Tachyon G9700 Pro graphics card comes in a big paper box.
The package also includes a user’s manual, a CD with drivers, DVI-to-VGA and S-Video-to-Composite adapters, Composite-to-Composite and S-Video-to-S-Video cables and also a PC-Plug power cable.
Overall, we have everything necessary to use the card and yet… We guess a few more CDs with games and other software would be appropriate here. RADEON 9700 Pro based cards are far from being low-cost now, so manufacturers aren’t usually stingy about various supplements like full versions of modern 3D games and video processing software.
Anyway, the graphics card is the main thing so let’s not look into the package too long. We’d better turn to Tyan Tachyon G9700 PRO itself.
The specs of the card exactly follow the reference design from ATI. Tyan Tachyon carries 128MB of DDR SDRAM and works at the standard 325MHz/620MHz frequencies. At first sight it looks different from widely-spread SAPPHIRE RADEON 9700 PRO cards as it’s lacquered blue, not red as most other RADEON based products. But if we take a closer look at the card we will see that it follows exactly the same reference-design from ATI as most other RADEON 9700 PRO based cards.
A definitely interesting thing to point out about the TYAN's graphics card is that the Tachyon G9700 PRO comes equipped with on-board hardware monitoring function that is able to monitor fan, voltage as well as temperatures of the VPU and memory. Users can view this information via good-looking TYAN Graphics Monitor software bundled with the product. Maybe you think that the feature is not really a necessary one, however, we believe it is always better to have a feature rather than not to have it. Furthermore, TYAN's Tachyon G9700 PRO does not really cost considerably more than competing solutions, but is the only one that offers us to monitor itself. Why not monitor it for free?
There is also another more important difference. It’s the cooling system. Tyan paid due attention to proper cooling of the graphics chip as well as of memory chips and even of the onboard voltage regulator. You can see in the snapshots massive heatsinks installed on both sides of the card. Let’s dwell upon this cooling solution for a while.
In fact, RADEON 9700 PRO consumes 45W at most. It’s quite a lot, but ATI refused to use any big coolers, like the ones installed onto GeForce4 Ti4600 or GeForceFX. We have a small active cooler instead, which proves to be quite enough for the reference card to work stable at its regular frequencies and even to have some overclocking potential.
Graphics cards following the ATI’s reference design don’t have memory chips cooling. There are no heatsinks, although BGA-packaged DDR SDRAM working at 620MHz heats up considerably. All this suggests that RADEON 9700 PRO based cards don’t actually require such a big cooler as used in Tachyon G9700 PRO for stable work and overclocking.
The cooler in Tachyon G9700 Pro consists of two parts. One is installed on the front side of the PCB, the other – on the backside. That is, we have got a fully-fledged active cooler for the graphics chip and memory chips and a heatsink to cool down the memory chips and the core from the backside of the card. The cooler has nothing exceptional about itself. Its aluminum heatsink is made with the extrusion technology, so all the ribs are parallel and are of the same 8mm height. The fan is 50mm in diameter. It blows the air along the ribs, but as they are parallel, the airflow will spread unevenly through the heatsink. That’s why we may suppose the upper memory chips will be cooled less effectively than the ones installed in the right part of the card’s PCB.
When we took the front side of the cooler off the graphics card, we saw five thermal pads that lie in between the heatsink and the graphics chip with four DDR SDRAM chips. These are synthetic polymeric pads, and those of them that touch memory chips are rather thick: about 1.5mm.
The backside heatsink has the same shape as the front-face cooler. The ribs of this heatsink are about 1.5mm high and stand in parallel, too. This heatsink touches the front-face cooler in its upper part, but we can’t refer to the two heatsinks as to a single whole as they have very weak contact between each other.
The heatsink carries four polymeric heat-conducting pads, the same as the front-side cooler has. These pads press against the memory chips.
This heatsink also takes heat off the graphics chip. There is another heat-conducting pad glued at the back of the PCB right under the die. The heatsink touches it with the foot of a small cylindrical lug.
We won’t make guesses about the efficiency of such a cooling solution made up of two heatsinks. We will see it at work during overclocking.
Tyan Tachyon G9700 PRO has one more aluminum heatsink cooling power units of the card. Actually, it’s the first time we see a heatsink installed there. All other graphics cards we have tested usually use a regular heatspreader plate instead of the heatsink.
The heatsink is glued to two chips that are a part of the power circuitry of the card. It was rather loose-sitting and ready to break off, but this might have been a defect of our given card only.
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:
The software we used:
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.
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 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:
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.
We ran four tests from the 3DMark 2001SE suite: Game1, Game2, Game3 and Game4. They all ran at 32-bit color depth, the first three tests ran with high level of detail.
Game 1 named no definite winner. The both cards show similar results and even overclocking brings no great advantage. So, the two cards are at even here.
The second gaming test produces a larger gap between the results in overclocked and nominal modes. And once again, the graphics card from Tyan loses to the competitor.
It’s all like in the Game 1 test: overclocking brings about no significant performance growth.
Game 4 shows that even extra 5MHz of graphics chip frequency and 10MHz of memory frequency may seriously affect the card’s performance in games using pixel shaders.
To sum it all up, the graphics cards show similar results in two of the four tests and overclocking brings no serious advantages here. But in the remaining two tests every megahertz is of some help. Overclocked SAPPHIRE RADEON 9700 PRO wins them as it has 5MHz higher frequency.
The last benchmark in our review is AquaMark.
AquaMark 2.0 uses the graphics engine from AquaNox game, which is a mixture of arcade, shooter and futuristic submarines simulator. It’s a rather old game, but has excellent graphics. AquaMark 2.0 uses Direct3D. It’s possible to specify the amount of textures to be used in the test demo. We chose 24MB of textures, which is more than enough for modern games.
Once again we see significant performance growth from overclocking. It can be as high as 20% depending on the screen resolution. The card from SAPPHIRE wins this test, just like all the previous ones.
To our regret, the powerful cooler installed in Tyan Tachyon G9700 PRO didn’t help it at overclocking that much. Although the card features two heatsinks bracing it up from both sides, Tyan engineers didn’t even increase the graphis chip and memory frequencies above the nominal recommended by ATI. Moreover, the graphics card proved even less overclockable than a simpler SAPPHIRE RADEON 9700 PRO card. While the two cost about the same, you will hardly want to buy Tyan Tachyon G9700 PRO for overclocking purposes, although its stable and reliable functioning will surely be a determinative for those of you who need a good and securely working system.