LOSTCIRCUITS

Overclocking

The first thing we were interested in was whether the claims made by Tyan regarding overclocking were going beyond bragging rights. The one thing we want to stress again here is the issue of driver installation. In reviews of the same card posted elsewhere we noted that under stress conditions when overclocked, the TACHYON G9700 would run rather hot. This is exactly what we described on the last page when the card was simply swapped in for a generic RADEON. Along these lines, as we already mentioned, after a fresh installation of the drivers, the temperatures measured on the heatspreader never exceeded 31.5 centigrades. Lower temperatures, on the other hand, also mean better overclocking capabilities. Suffice it to say that in the original tests, we were stuck at around 370 and 325 MHz for the core and memory frequencies, respecively. Anything higher would result in pixel white-out / blackout (core frequency) or else triangle flashing and other visual artifacts.

Suffice it to further say that after the reinstallation of the drivers, we were able to run the card as high as 402 / 350 MHz with only minor artifacts. We still ran into a few stability problems, depending on the application, that is, CodeCreatures would lock up at anything higher than 380 / 340 MHz. For benchmarking purposes, we settled on what we thought was a reasonable compromise, that is 370 / 340 MHz at which the TACHYON was purring along without the slightest problems whatsoever.

Keep in mind that this is still an observation and only meant as such. For the record, the original RADEON 9700 Pro used for comparison started failing beyond 350 / 330 MHz.

Performance

When we checked the TACHYON G9700 Pro versus the RADEON 9700 Pro, we found in general that the TACHYON was ever so slightly faster. Powerstrip showed showed a minor difference between the two cards with respect to the memory frequency that is, 309 MHz for the RADEON vs. 311 MHz for the TACHYON, nothing to write home about but enough to explain the consistent lead of the Tachyon.

CodeCreatures

We ran CodeCreatures at stock speed with both cards and then at 370 / 340 MHz, starting with the default benchmark for baseline comparison (1024 x 768 x 32 noAA) and then proceeded to look at the different AntiAliasing modes at 1280 x 1024 x 32 bpp.

13.2% performance increase between baseline and overclocked settings

15.1% performance increase between baseline and overclocked settings

13.1% performance increase between baseline and overclocked settings

11.6% performance increase between baseline and overclocked settings

The trend is that higher resolution increases the delta, with increasing AA settings, however, the performance increments become smaller.

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