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| Tyan Tachyon G9700 Pro Roses are red, violets are blue .. | |
| (Review by MS, Jan 28, 2003) |
Test Setup
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Software
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All benchmarks were run with the quality slider left at the "Balanced" setting unless indicated otherwise.
Installation Issues
Under normal circumstances we would have expected a smooth swapping between the ATi RADEON 9700 and the Tyan TACHYON G9700, for some reason, it did not happen. Without wanting to point any fingers, what happened was that the RADEON was installed first (fresh install) and after running the benchmarks, the TACHYON was substituted. So far so good but the system would crash even at default settings within approximately 5 minutes as soon as there were any demanding loads on the 3D engine. Moreover, and that one was the scary part, the TACHYON heatspreader would get too hot to touch, we measured over 40 centigrades surface temperature at default speed while running 3DMark2001SE. For the record, the fan was working, we did check that.
As strange as it sounds, the issues were completely resolved with a complete uninstall of both the Catalyst 3.0 drivers and the ATi control panel and subsequent reinstall. One possibility that comes to mind is that Powerstrip was installed on the system which reported an unknown graphics adapter from which it was incapable of reading the correct frequencies and that there may have been some interactions.
There is a possible explanation for the phenomenon which is based on the BIOS IDs of RADEONs "built by ATI" and RADEON spawns "powered by ATI". That is, "built by ATI" are 4-ID cards, whereas the "powered by ATI" cards are 2-ID cards. Swapping a 2-ID card in for a 4-ID card can potentially cause the drivers to look for something that is not there and cause the system to go into a loop. This would be consistent with the WinXP error messages we received that the "ATI driver caused the system to hang by going into a loop".
Bottomline is, though that the performance did not change from before to after reinstalling, what did change, were the operating temperatures that, after the uninstall and reinstall never exceeded 31.5 centigrades even under the highest overclocking conditions. Why do we mention this? Simple reason, we have read elsewhere that the TACHYON is running very hot, also, somebody else may run into the same situation / problem. A normal user may not run into these issues at all because they usually do not swap in and out cards, however, there is a distinct possibility for this to occur and our findings may provide a solution for others, too.
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