Hercules Dynamite TNT2 Ultra

Here's the killer, AnandTech had tremendous problems with the Super7 platform and the first TNT2 board reviewed here.  It turns out that ALi doesn't have the best chipset platform in terms of Super7 compatibility, as was first proven by the compatibility problems between the Savage4 and the Aladdin V chipset.  The TNT2 exhibited similar behavior when put in an Aladdin V board, however the opposite seems to be true with the VIA MVP3 chipset using VIA's latest AGP drivers (3.3).   Although the installation and setup of the Hercules Dynamite TNT2 was still a bit more painful on AnandTech's Super7 test bed than on the Slot-1 test bed, after installing the latest AGP drivers, the bus mastering drivers, the IRQ routing driver, the PCI bridge patch, the NVIDIA TNT2 Ultra drivers and finally the AGP drivers again, in that order, the test bed came to life.  NVIDIA's latest build of TNT2 drivers, that will hopefully become available to the public within the next week or so, contain vastly improved 3DNow! enhancements in the code, the results?  Well, see for yourself, here is just a glimpse of what AnandTech has been working on in the lab, a full fledged video comparison as well as a K6-3 revisited article are in the works at AnandTech with some extremely pleasing results for all you Super7 users out there. 

Here's something interesting, at the default clock speed of 175/200MHz, the Dynamite TNT2 Ultra on the AMD K6-3 400 is 16% slower than on the Pentium III 500 which has a 25% clock speed advantage over the K6-3 400.  Interesting...  AnandTech is currently working on a full investigation of current performance of the K6-3 and K6-2 processors and will be publishing results as well as a quick guide in the next week, here are some more teasers to tide you over until then ;)