TYAN Tachyon G9700 Pro - ATi Radeon 9700 - Uk Edition
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It is with great joy in our hearts that we as the first hardware test site in Europe and maybe the rest of the IT world, have received the brand new TYAN Tachyon G9700 Pro for testing. It has also been a great pleasure since this is the first Radeon 9700 card on this site making it a challenge of the more special kind.
The Radeon 9700 card class in itself isn’t new and has already been on the marked for some time now. What makes this particular card so special is based on the fact that TYAN as the first has opted to make their own card on their own PCB, whereas all other current producers selling Radeon 9700 card has used the ATi reference design. In other words: ATi made the cards.
One of the first indications of this is the color of the card. Unlike a lot of the other Radeon 9700 cards this card isn’t red and this is not the only difference. If one looks at the board and compares it to the reference board it’s noticeable that a large number of the components are different, leaving the big R300 GPU as one of the only identical components.
Because of this TYAN has had a wide range of opportunities in deciding on the looks and design of the card, something they seem to have handled quite well judging from the looks of it. The size of the card itself is rather small and compact for a card in this class and is similar to a Ti4200 card when it comes to size.
Even though this is the first sample on the market TYAN managed to work everything out in terms of the card, design wise speaking and even the box for the card is ready with the card in it as it can be seen in stores in near future.
This is merely the second card in the series that TYAN has made since they, as many might know, have been focused on and been known for making motherboards up until a few months ago. They have shown very positive results in this field with the TYAN Tachyon G9000 Pro card that we’ve tested on this site.
How TYAN managed this time is something we’ll see much more off all the way through this article but let’s get started and see how the box looks when you have managed to get the card within sight.
Illustration 1
A real beauty of a box as I see it. It’s illustratively seen very nicely made as well as being detailed. Apart from the pretty colors the box is crammed with information concerning the stuff contained in it as well as technical specifications on the card itself, which has not been seen in live action up until now.
Once you’ve seen enough of it it’s time to pull the white box inside out and have a look at the card with the powerful performance and the yet unknown bundle. So no time for waiting. it’s time to get it checked out.
The first things we check in the box apart from the card are the accessories that TYAN has opted to bundle as shown below.
Illustration 2
Upon checking the picture a bit more thoroughly you’ll notice that the CD with the drivers for the card is a CDR without printing, which means the final driver CD is not yet made. This means we’ve been equipped with a burned CD although it has the same on it as the final version will.
Apart from the CD and WinDVD 4.0 there’s TV-Out cables in a nice thick quality as well as a DVI converter. It isn’t really the biggest bundle but the question is whether more is actually needed. The crew here at TweakUp is not of that opinion since the quality of the games one usually see with bundles are of such a low quality that people doesn’t try them anyways. TYAN opted not to include those which is ok. The bundle includes what is needed and not more.
The most important thing in the box is obviously the rather heavy card hidden in the anti static bag and it’s about time that we show the TYAN Tachyon G9700 Pro card for you, the readers, for the first time.
Illustration 3
This picture shows the card fresh out of the box and yes it IS not very big especially considering the components used for the card. The next thing you notice is the enormous cooling profile covering both the R300 GPU as well as the blocks of memory. The profile isself is so big that it’s sampled into the card and therefore also covers the backside of the card which we’ll show in a few.
Illustration 4
The color of their card is precisely the same as on their G9000 Pro card, that being a greenish shade and it makes a perfect match with the blue cooling profile. On top of the fan you can read that this, surprise surprise!, it’s a TYAN card from the Tachyon family. The first thing that comes to mind upon sitting with the card is how fast is this thing and how much noise does the 50 mm fan they put on the card emit.
One of the details we noticed was the presence of a current-thief or more correctly, an actual power cord placed there to supply extra power to the entire card. This is due to the vast amount of power that the card consumes and thus the supply from he AGP card alone is not enough when the card is hitting those high peaks. Because of this the card has been equipped with a power plug making it possible to supply the needed power from the PSU. The cable itself comes with the card saving the problem of having to obtain one yourself.
Illustration 5
The backside of the card is very interesting to look at mainly because the profile from the front side is built into the backside in a way where there’s coolers on both sides of the card and the heat can move around in all of the profile. A small cooling profile is also located on a smaller unit on the edge of the card. Unfortunately I have been unable to make out the identity of it and thus all I can state is that it’s a chip that becomes rather warm when the card is running.
Even thought the card is very well wrapped in fan and profile then it’s very hot to remove the card to make it possible to get a view of the details making it the card that we know it for. The VPU (Video Processing Unit) and RAM.
Illustration 6
After both sections of the cooling device has been removed making it possible to show you the backside it becomes apparent where the profile makes contact with the VPU and the 8 memory blocks on the card. It is only at the VPU itself cooling paste is applied just as it is the case with normal fans. At every memory module the material is a bit more rubber like but it still transfers heat from the module to the cooling profile.
Illustration 7
Once the cooling device has been removed from the card all the goodies are revealed and the first thing that draws attention is the huge VPU unit situated smack in the middle of the card. The VPU unit is surrounded with a metal frame to stabilize the cooling profile to avoid the core of the VPU being destroyed if the cooling profile takes a bump.
The size of the VPU is enormous and is physically seen bigger than the core of an AMD processor measuring a full 110 mm in height which is huge if you have a processor for a graphics card in mind. The R300 chip does contain 110 million transistors which makes it the the largest amount of transistors seen on a graphics processor as of days date. This isn’t nearly the end since the development is rushing on and within a short amount of time we’ll be seeing graphic processors with even more transistors packed on even less space.
The efficient speed of the VPU on the TYAN Tachyon G9700 Pro card is 325MHz, which is the normal when speaking of the R300 chip. This makes it very interesting to see exactly how much it can be overclocked with the standard cooling device.
Going back to the card brings us to the revelation of the 8 memory blacks as the cooling device was removed and you now note that they’re divided into 4 modules on each side of the card. The memory modules are the small black dots on the card each of them consisting of 16mb worth of data capacity giving a total yield of 128mb RAM on the board running 256bit DDR
The memory is of the brand Samsung and the writing makes it impossible to catch it on the picture so here it is – GC2A. Which can then be deciphered into it being 2.8ns RAM modules. This is the same type of modules seen on several other Radeon 9700 card so in this specific area TYAN has opted to stick with the tactics and components from the reference card. The RAM should be able to run at a speed of 350 (700 MHZ DDR ) being 2.8ns modules and is delivered from TYAN running 310 ( 620 MHZ DDR ) making room for a tad of overclocking which we of course will take a look at as well.
Before the test…[
Before the test was carried out the card was overlooked in the hunt of possible weaknesses and before continuing we’d like to point out that the major weakness is the fan on the card. It’s simply a tad too noisy for a graphics card and it’s in a noise level not quite acceptable. It requires a rather good noise dampening case to reduce the noise to a level where it’s no longer a nuisance to the user. Something not all people are in possession of just yet
We have contacted TYAN on the topic and presented them with sound tests of the fan active of the card since we’re of the opinion that it’s in need of some changes and that either a less noisy fan or another cooling profile should be used . The profile itself is of such a voluminous size that such a aggressive fan isn’t needed and there’s a chance that TYAN might have miscalculated their profile and fan output incorrect.
The test
Apart from the problem with the fan there really isn’t much bad to say about the card and it’s about time to get started with the actual testing so we can get an idea of exactly how much power is hidden in the card and whether it fulfills the expectations one holds to a Radeon 9700 card.
Configuration
Intel Pentium 4 2.4A GHz - FSB400
SOYO P4S Dragon Ultra
256MB PC3500 Corsair memory
Maxtor DiamondMax 8+ 30Gb
Windows XP Pro UK edition. ATi Catalyst driver 6.10.13.6193 reference driver.
I chose the test program 3DMark2001Se build 330 for the testing of the card as well as the new demo of Unreal Tournament 2003 since the game has very high requirements.
The test was carried out in such a way that all tests and the optimization of the card was done in 3DMark2003 and afterwards the specifications and setup that resulted in the highest results were used for the test with the game to ensure stability during all activities as well as achieving the ideal results from the graphics card.
Lets start by showing a little from Power Strip, which we used in cooperation with the card to tune the core and memory during the test. This picture is from the setup of Power Strip where the program is detecting the specifications of the card.
Illustration 8
As it can be seen here then the card runs 325MHz on the core and 310MHz on the memory which fits pretty well with the standard specifications given on the Radeon 9700 cards in general. As we wrote earlier during the walkthrough of the card then the RAM can run at a potentially higher speed than the frequency they run at as standard. Based on this we’re hoping for a bit of overclocking but more about that later.
Lets get started with the results for the card
Illustration 9
It has to be said. It’s a pretty impressive result for the card considering no tweaking has been preformed on it nor on the system the test was carried out on. Almost all that work a bit with computers and do a lot of tweaking know that overclocking usually means higher results which is something we’ll look into a bit later.
Around the 13.500 in a standard test is pretty good for the card and it’s pretty close to the result I expected on this system. It is to be said that the card has been tested with our AMD system that went unstable due to other reasons and thus had to be replaced. The result on the card on a 2100+ Athlon XP with a KT333 motherboard was around the 12.500 giving it a score some 1000 points lower than this systemt.
Having a card in this class and knowing it yields potential for overclocking as we found out in the walkthrough of it earlier means we have to try it.
Therefore I started a couple of tests at the same time while testing for instability and errors in 3DMark2001. It took about 1½ hour to find the optimal speed for the card. It is to be said that the card can run at higher speeds than what we obtained as maximum but if we went any higher the performance started to drop.
Illustration 10
Then there was only one thing to do and that was to get started with the testing and the results were definitely of the satisfying kind. The test war carried out 5 times to make sure the card stayed stable at this speed. At the same time we checked how much the results varied from test to test and learned that the test varied +/- 20 points which is perfectly normal.
Illustration 11
We now passed the 14.000 points which is pretty cool for the card especially when we keep in mind that the processor isn’t tuned in any way. The reason for us not showing results with a tuned processor is because it would be a bit like cheating with the results since they’d clearly be higher than at standard speed and then the card alone is not responsible for the performance.
After the first couple of tests showing no problems of any kind it was about time to see how the card preformed in games where we as earlier mentioned chose to run the new Unreal Tournament 2003 demo.
The reason for the use of this specific game in the test is based on it’s high requirements for hardware especially the graphics card due to it’s wild and extremely detailed graphics. This will be displayed in the results which may not be as high as one could expect when it comes to machines and graphic cards in the caliber we’re using today.
We ran the test in 4 different resolutions in the demo and it is to be said that we during the test found out that several tweaks are needed to get decent results with a Radeon card. If this is not done then the results obtained would actually be lower than those of a Ti4200 card.
After having tweaked the game and the drivers for UT2003 time had come to make some tests of the card. All tests in UT2003 ran at the same speed as the last test with the 3DMark2001se, which means it ran in the tuned edition.
Illustration 12
Here’s a row of numbers to take a look at. The figures in itself says everything and what really jumps into your eyes is the difference between flyby and botmatch but this is due to the big difference in what’s required from the card. In botmatch a group of “units” starts butchering each other and shots are fired right and left in large style, requirering a lot of resources from the graphics card for it to be able to run smooth and to show all the effects.
The flyby test flew away without any problems which can also be seen on the very high FPS figures, but we didn’t get those results until we carried out a rather heavy tweak of the game.
In the test of the Tachyon G9000 Pro card we observed that a Ti4200 card has around 177 FPS in the same test meaning it’s not that much higher a score the G9700 Pro card gets indicating that ATI has a huge problem with its drivers.
They haven’t made their drivers like Nvidia who have managed to deliver standard drivers that works on every single game at very high speed. ATi makes drivers that are optimized for a few games and test programs and is the wish something else then one has to find all sorts of tips and tweaks. That isn’t a big problem for the user that knows about such stuff and has the time to do it. If you on the other hand are an inexperienced user then you might not discover the lack of performance in the game and might generally experience graphical problems in a lot of games.
This is a mistake that we hope ATi figures out how to fix within a short amount of time since it’s been a major reason for people not to buy ATi based cards. It simply because takes to much to make it work in an optimized way.
Conclusion
TYAN have with their TYAN Tachyon G9700 Pro presented their card number 2 on the market. When the card makes it out on the market that is because we’re still sitting here with the first sample of their card. This also means that this sample isn’t the final version and at the same time we here at TweakUp are hoping for TYAN to change the fan speed or altogether change the fan on the card to something less noisy.
The design of the card from TYAN itself is perfect and the small compact card can easily fit into all motherboards without any contact with the RAM slots or the like.
TYAN has been pretty unlucky with the choice of fan for the card. The profile itself is cool and efficient enough but the fan mounted on it is too noisy compared to it’s efficiency. WE did a checkup on the design of the fan and it came out to be an OEM fan from Thermaltake made for the Radeon 9500/9700 series and it indicates that Thermaltake hasn’t made the best OEM fans on the market. Their designs are great but the fans are too fast and noisy. As stated earlier we have contacted TYAN concerning this problem and we’re hoping that they’ll change it when the card reaches final release.
The performance of the card is really good along with an awesome quality of the picture but the last is something ATi is well known for. ATi has yet another time proven that it can remain high and combined with a big graphical design screen you’re provided with the best combination.
ATi still has a problem with their drivers since the specific drivers aren’t as generally optimized as for instance Nvidia has done with theirs. This means one have to work a bit with the drivers for the card and find tweaks to the games you wish to play to gain the optimal performance from the card.
At what level the TYAN Tachyon G9700 Pro will be priced at is yet unknown but rumors has it that it will be in the same areas as the cards already on the market.
When it all comes down to it then TYAN has managed a really great card with 1 exception. Despite this then just seeing a card from the former grand producer of motherboards on it’s own print is a landmark really worth acknowledging and if they get the noise from the fan corrected then the card is just perfect The problem with the drivers is for ATi to solve and it’s not really something TYAN can do much about. Their work is done and it turned into the TYAN Tachyon G9700 Pro |
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Dato:
13.11.02
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Artikel vist : 14637 gange
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