Date:
Tuesday , December 17, 2002
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Sean Quinn
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Tyan Tachyon G9700 Pro

Tyan is making an introduction into the graphics card community. They are pushing forward with a series of ATI Powered video cards engineered for the hardcore gamer and overclocker. This is our PREview of their 9700 based engineering sample.

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Test Setup

Gigabyte 8IHXP, P4 2.53GHz, 512MB Kingston PC1066 RDRAM, Maxtor 40GB ATA/133, 3Com 3C905C-TXNM, Windows XP Pro SP1, DirectX 8.1b, Intel Chipset INF 4.04.1007

Tyan Tachyon G9700 Pro – Operating at default clock speeds and overclocked speeds using Catalyst driver 2.4 Packing Version 7.79 Version 6.13.10.6200

We do realize that the Catalyst 2.5’s are out now, but at the time of testing the 2.4’s were the latest driver set available.

Software

One CD was included with our package. On this CD was all of the software you need to get off the ground with the Catalyst driver suite and WinDVD 4.0 for DVD playback. The driver version included on the CD is 6.13.10.6178. These are a bit outdated as far as the Catalyst drivers go. The current latest version on ATI’s site is the Catalyst 2.5 version 6.13.10.6218. The CD is laid out very well and the menu program that automatically runs when the CD is installed is very easy to navigate and to install the software contained on the CD.

One very important feature of this card, one that we mentioned earlier, is the hardware monitoring. The software can monitor the voltage, temperature, and regulate fan speed on this video card. Unfortunately, our card is an engineering sample and does not have the hardware monitoring that the production boards will have. However, I was able to at least run the monitoring software to take a brief look at it.

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The first tab is called video settings and lets you adjust the VPU and memory speed. The max it would let you set the core at is 385MHz. Now, IMO that is not going to be enough for the really hardcore overclockers that want to try insane speeds with their card. You would have to use a third party tweaker such as PowerStrip to try higher core speeds. The memory slider allows up to a 700MHz top speed. This tab will also be the one that gives you the fan speed, temperature, and a Detail button that will give you even more information such as voltages. The product features tab gives you an overview of the features of the card. The Help Tab shows you a small Q&A regarding overclocking on your card.

Overclocking

Tyan Tachyon G9700 Pro overclocking is probably what most of you want to hear about. I don’t know where the rumor about it started, but there was a lot of talk about the Tyan 9700 Pro card coming clocked at an overclocked state, near 400MHz at default. Well, that isn’t the case; this card is not overclocked by default. It comes clocked at the standard 325MHz core and 620MHz DDR memory speed.

With the cooling system Tyan uses, I was expecting some good overclocks, and I was not disappointed. Using Powerstrip, I first tried the big overclock, to 400MHz core. At 400MHz it ran 3DMark2001SE for about 30 seconds before wild pixel errors started to occur and worsened as the benchmark continued. It finally got to a point where the whole screen was garbled and then the computer locked up. 400MHz was not a success. I backed it down to 390MHz, and at this speed there were still pixel errors throughout the benchmark run but it DID complete it successfully. I got a 3DMark score of 15,101. Since there were way too many errors, I still had to back it down even more; I went to 385MHz. At this speed there were no errors and everything ran through without problems, with AA and AF enabled as well. 385MHz core speed was the highest stable core overclock I got.

I first cranked the memory up to 350MHz (700MHz DDR) to see what would happen. At this speed 3DMark2001 would run, but as the game progressed, major polygon errors occurred and worsened. I backed the memory down to 340MHz (680MHz DDR) and the polygon errors went away and I was able to run through smoothly without errors with AA and AF enabled as well. The final stable overclock on our card was 385MHz/340MHz (680MHz DDR). Because this is the highest stock overclock we've gotten on a 9700 Pro, the benchmarks that follow will show you the difference in overclocking when compared to default Radeon 9700 Pro speeds.