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LOSTCIRCUITS
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the specs
setting up
performance
Conclusions
 ASUS TNT V3400
TNT for ALi?
(Review by RoadRunner, edited by MS, Jan 28, 1999)

Performance and overclocking

As soon as I accepted the OpenGL problems and decided to only run D3D tests, I wanted to see how high it could go stable. My own expectations weren’t so high, been disappointed before and actually expected a Socket 7 board less stable than a Slot1 setup. In any case, here are my highest stable settings without loss of image quality, to add a safetly margin these numbers were even reduced two steps to a core frequency of 122 MHz and memory set to 132 MHz. As it turns out, this chip has no problems with cooling, the temperature stayed within the 40 centigrade range under all D3D applications. Interestingly, after reinstalling the Voodoo2 3D accelerator for some gaming action, the temperatures monitored for the V3400 TNT were actually higher.


Direct 3D scores: All scores with fast memory timings, 800x600 and 16 bit color. Core/Memory settings. Half-Life, Blowout demo, was run three times for each setting, average of the two last ones noted. Unreal scores of the "Flyby scene" were taken as the average score after the fifth cycle. For comparison, the numbers obtained with the 8MB Voodoo2.



Core/Memory clock 90/110 90/132 122/110122/132 Voodoo2
Half-Life[fps] 17.8 17.9 18.2 18.3 24.4
Unreal [fps] 25.9 26.0 27.2 27.5 28.7


It is pretty obvious that overclocking the memory alone does not increase the performance. Increasing the core clock, however does result in a small performance enhancement.

After testing I also played both games for a while and in single player they are no problems with either game regarding the playablity. As you can see, in Unreal the performance of the TNT comes rather close to the V2, whereas in Half-Life the TNT falls behind a bit farther and actually a difference between the two setups could be noticed. The image quality in D3D is pretty much the same as it is when I use the V2 card so definitely good enough. Of course it isn’t perfect in further distances but then again, who looks far away in 3D games? In the heat of the moment it is enough trouble staying alive myself without admiring the panorama.

Open GL performance

Since the problems with open GL didn’t leave me alone, I kept on playing around with the system settings and finally got the V3400 stable. As it turns out, the key to stability is to enable anisotropic mipmapping. Permit dithering is a another possibility to achieve stability.



Crusher / Massive / Timedemo 1


Quake 2, ver 3.19, using 3DNow!OpenGL drivers, 16-bit color, AMD 380 running at 400MHz and V3400 clocked to 122/132. At 1600x1200 the frame rates of the different benchmarks are closing in onto each other as expected since the load of generating the huge mass of pixels overrides the differences in demand on the CPU.

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