Tyan Tachyon G9600Pro
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Tyan has been a name synonymous with quality PC products since 1989 and recently have entered into the Video Card Graphics segment to provide their customers with quality video solutions for their PC's. Tyan may not be well known in the enthusiast sector since they typically don't make cutting edge motherboards that overclockers can dig their teeth into. They do however make great server and workstation based products with both Intel and AMD chipsets, sporting multiple processors and a high degree of stability and quality.
Tyan Tachyon G9600Pro
Introduction
Tyan has been a name synonymous with quality PC products since 1989 and recently have entered into the Video Card Graphics segment to provide their customers with quality video solutions for their PC's. Tyan may not be well known in the enthusiast sector since they typically don't make cutting edge motherboards that overclockers can dig their teeth into. They do however make great server and workstation based products with both Intel and AMD chipsets, sporting multiple processors and a high degree of stability and quality.
When ATi announced their Radeon line of graphics cards, several hardware manufacturers jumped at the chance to give their buyers a taste and Tyan was one of them. Serving a full line of Radeon cards, Tyan's most notable is arguably the Tachyon G9700Pro that was one of the best performing 9700 Pro's to date and was a highly sought after video card. This quickly established Tyan as a major player in the video card market and today we take a look at the G9600Pro to see if they can continue to live up to our expectations.
Specifications
Here are the official specifications of the Tachyon G9600Pro
Visual Processing Unit
- ATI® RADEON™ 9600 PRO
- 400MHz core frequency |
| Onboard Frame Buffer
- 128MB DDR SDRAM
- 600MHz DDR frequency |
| System Requirements
- Intel® Pentium® 4 / III / II /
- Celeron™ or compatible with
- AGP 8X/4X/2X
- AMD-K6®/Athlon™/Athlon™
- XP or compatible with AGP
- 8X/4X/2X
- Windows® XP, 2000, 98/ME
- 128MB of system memory
- Installation software requires
- CD-ROM drive
- DVD Playback requires
- DVD drive |
| Video Output
- DB15 VGA Analog out
- DVI-I Digital out
DVI
- TV Analog out
. . . S-Video
. . . Composite
- Dual Monitor Support |
| Package Contents
- 1 Tachyon Card
- 3 Video Cables
- 1 DVI-VGA Adapter
DVI w/ 2 adapters
- 1 User's Manual
- 1 Driver CD:
. . . Drivers & WinDVD 4.0
. . . Tachyon Graphics Monitor
- 1 Quick Installation Guide
(Multi-Language) |
| Interface
- AGP 8X/4X support |
|
|
 | SMARTSHADER™ 2.0
• Programmable pixel and vertex shaders (up to
• 1024 instructions with flow control)
• 16 textures per pass
• Pixel shaders up to 160 instructions with
• 128-bit floating point precision
• Multiple render target support
• Shadow volume rendering acceleration
• High precision 10-bit/ch. frame buffer support
• Supports DirectX® 9.0 and the latest OpenGL
SMOOTHVISION™ 2.1
• 2x/4x/6x full scene anti-aliasing modes
with programmable sample patterns
• 2x/4x/8x/16x anisotropic filtering modes
HYPER Z™ III+
• 3-level Hierarchical Z-Buffer with early Z test
• Lossless Z-Buffer Compression
TRUFORM™ 2.0
• 2nd generation N-Patch higher order surface
support
FULLSTREAM™
• Hardware accelerated de-blocking tehnology |
| VIDEOSHADER™
• Seamless integration of pixel shaders w/ video
DISPLAY FEATURES
• Dual integrated 400MHz DACs
• High resolution digital output up to 2048x1536
HYDRAVISION™
• Supports multi-display configurations
TACHYON GRAPHICS MONITOR
• Hardware monitoring of VPU and memory
temperature and voltage
• Fan speed adjustment
Other FEATURES
• Four parallel rendering pipelines process
up to 1.6 billion pixels per second
• Two parallel geometry engines process
up to 175 million polygons per second
• 128-bit DDR memory interface |
|
|
|
Tyan includes everything you'll need to get up and running with the latest drivers and software, as well as TV-Out, S-Video cables and DVI adaptor. Here is a comparison list for the Radeon 9600Pro and 9600 Non-Pro.
| | RADEON™ 9600 PRO | RADEON™ 9600 |
| Frame Buffer | 128MB DDR | 128MB DDR |
| Memory Interface | 128-bit | 128-bit |
| Rendering Pipelines | 4 | 4 |
| Pixel Fillrate (Gpixels/sec) | 1.6 | 1.3 |
| Engine Clock (MHz) | 400 | 325 |
| Memory Clock (MHz) | 600 | 400 |
| Output Connections | VGA + TV + DVI | VGA + TV + DVI |
While the 9600Pro doesn't seem to be extremely more powerful than it's non-pro counterpart, the extra core and memory clock can certainly come in handy when playing your favorite graphically intensive games. Specially when your aching to run some level of FSAA. More on that later.
Next: Unpacking and Installing >>
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