Tyan Tomcat K8E

Performance:

Unlike VIA with their open source Linux drivers for their Chipsets, including the K8T890, one of the reasons nForce 4 Linux support is currently a bit garbled has been due to hardware and software conflicts/detection with the Chipset. One of these hardware conflicts has been between nForce 4 motherboards and 6600GT PCI Express graphics cards, which we happen to be using for the Tyan Tomcat K8E testing today. We first booted up the FedoraCore3 x86_64 DVD and proceeded to reformat and re-install Fedora with the Tyan K8E motherboard. Toward the end of the installation, Anaconda (Red Hat Linux Installation Program) became distorted and turned different colors. As the packages on the DVD were last updated on November 8, 2004 when FedoraCore3 was released several of these bugs were not yet fixed as the nForce 4 was only released a month prior to FedoraCore3. In order to fix the graphics problem, we kept the Leadtek 6600GT PCI Express installed but changed the Init Display First over to PCI slot, so the ATI RAGE XL would be used. After restarting the Fedora installation using the onboard graphics, we had no graphical problems. Once the Fedora installation was complete, it connected to our up2date repository on our LAN to update all of the installed packages. This update included the 2.6.11 kernel and Xorg 6.8.2. Once the updates were installed, and the xorg.conf edited to allow for the NVIDIA graphics, the primary graphics was switched back over to the PCI Express 6600GT. After this had occurred, we had no graphical problems with the 6600GT. We proceeded to install the NVIDIA AMD64/EMT64 1.0-7174 display drivers with no other major conflicts. Next, we tested the system to make sure everything was detected and appropriate drivers were loaded. Everything hardware from the VIA Firewire controller to the Broadcom BCM5721 was detected and was functioning properly. However, we didn’t test any of the RAID configurations with this motherboard. Unfortunately, NVIDIA’s Active Armor nForce 4 onboard Firewall isn’t currently supported under Linux. Below is the setup used with the Tomcat K8E S2865 motherboard.

For comparison purposes, we’ll actually be comparing the AMD Athlon 64 system against an Intel Pentium 4 530 (3.0GHz) 32-bit system; due to Linux compatibility issues on some of our other nForce 4 based systems at this present time. However, we plan to launch some more nForce 4 motherboard reviews very soon. The comparison system was comprised of the same components except for the motherboard and processor. All of the same software packages were used, except the i386 versions rather than the x86_64 architecture.

As for AMD’s Cool ‘n’ Quiet Technology, which is implemented onto the Tyan K8E motherboard, it had no troubles functioning under Linux. We find this technology comparable to that of what NVIDIA uses with the 2D/3D clocks on their GeForce FX and 6XXX graphics cards for running the card slower when rendering 2D graphics. While allowing the computer to idle or do simple tasks such as typing in AbiWord or using Mozilla Firefox, the CPU frequency would clock back to around 1GHz but when a larger load would be placed on the processor, the frequency would jump back to its appropriate speeds and also increase the CPU fan speed. Once the CPU was overclocked, Cool ‘n’ Quiet continued to work properly with the higher speeds while clocking down when having only a small load on the processor.

The benchmarks we're running on our test systems today are Unreal Tournament 2003, Doom 3, Blue Sail Vector Scalar Product, Blue Sail Sparse-Vector Scalar Product, and Blue Sail Singular Value Decomposition. In addition, we are also using hdparm, glxgears, timing of tar archiving/extraction, time of compile, and using LAME to encode some audio files. As always, the higher the FPS the better, and the less time required for each benchmark to complete the better.