Tyan Tachyon G9600Pro - Unpacking and Installing

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Tyan Tachyon G9600Pro

 

 

Out of the Box

The G9600Pro is an impressive looking card considering it's aimed towards the midrange buyer. The heatsink is a nice looking anodized blue and covers the GPU as well as the memory chips to keep things cool. I'm pretty sure heat won't be an issue with this particular chipset, but as Tyan is well known for stability in their products, we definitely don't plan on seeing any heat related issues here. We'll cover this a bit more once we have the Tyan Monitor Software loaded. Let's take a look at some snaps of the card.

 

 

 

 

Tyan has done a good job with their packaging scheme and the card comes with everything you'll need to get her up and running. Not alot of frills with this one, but I prefer substance over fluff and that's what you'll get with the Tachyon G9600Pro. More pics below.

 

  
 

 

 

The Blue Anodized HSF unit is beefy enough to get the job done right. It's a one piece covers all type design that cools both the VPU and the memory chips. This is not a particularly fond design for high end video cards that produce significant amounts of heat. But for the Radeon 9600 core, there shouldn't be any problems at all and I think Tyan did a great job with both the design and implementation of this particular cooling scheme.

 

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Installation

Getting the Tachyon G9600Pro installed was a snap with the included software from Tyan. They came complete with Catalyst 3.4 Drivers, Demo Software, Hardware monitoring and overclocking tools, WinDVD and a few other goodies. This software is for bulk use and appears to be distributed with the G9200, G9500, G9700 and G9800's as well. Let's take a closer look.

 

 

The most interesting software included here is by far the Tyan Graphics Monitor. A tweakers dream, the Graphics Monitor let's you monitor your VPU temperature as well as adjust the fan speed RPM's manually, or initiate automatic temperature control. A very nice feature for a mid-range video card and easily one of the features of the G9600Pro that set this card a notch above the rest.  Here are a few snaps while I played.

 

 

 

 

Tyan has really given the tweaker some powerful tools here to take care of our video cards. Hats off on this one to the Tyan Engineers that made this possible.

Here are some shots of the card installed in the system. Lookin' good.

 

 

 

 

The G9600Pro made a great compliment to the system and is an easy size to deal with. A welcome refresh from some of the klunkier cards that are gargantuan in size from the nVidia side of the house.

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Here is our system setup before we jump into the benchmarking section of the review

 

System Setup

• Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz CPU

• FIC 865PE Dynasty

• OCZ 512MB PC3200 EL DDR Platinum Memory

• WD SE 80GB HD

• Tyan Tachyon G9600Pro 128MB

• Albatron GF FX5600 256MB

• ABIT GF4 Ti 4200 64MB

• Windows XP Professional with service packs

• DirectX 9.0b

*Detonator FX 45.23's used for the nVidia based cards

*Catalyst 3.5's used for G9600Pro

 

The reason CAT3.5's were used for this review is when I loaded the 3.6's I could not get them to work in 90% of the 3D apps I was using for benchmarking. I tried several times but got very bad results so I rolled back to the 3.5 catalyst drivers and these ran flawlessly.

 

Benchmark Programs

• Unreal Tournament 2003 (featuring [H]ardOCP UT2k3 Benchmark)

• Splinter Cell

• Specview Perf 7

• 3DMark 01 SE Build 330

• 3DMark 03 Build 330

• Shadermark v1.7 (DX9 2.0 Pixel Shader Benchmark)

• Code Creatures

Next: Performance >>
 

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