Graphics card goes beyond the norm

Tyan's new Tachyon 9600 Pro graphics card offers both power and control to the user.

Tyan's new Tachyon 9600 Pro offers both power and control to the user.

Based on the latest ATI-Radeon 9600 Pro graphics chip, the Tachyon 9600 Pro boasts 60 million transistors, four pixel pipelines adjoined by one texture unit, resulting in a 4x1 architecture.

With a clock speed of 400MHz and supported by 128Mbyte of 300MHz DDR memory it offers a memory bandwidth of 9.6Gbyte/s.

Using a 0.13-micron manufacturing process, the VPU still requires less voltage and is dissipating less heat than its predecessor.

All of these results in an impressing fill rate of 1.6Gigatexel/s.

However, Tyan did not stop with the ATI reference design.

As with the famous Tachyon G9500 Pro, engineers worked to optimise the basic layout.

By elongating the aqua-blue PCB, they made room for an external speaker and a Winbond hardware monitoring chip.

Leveraging these components, the Tachyon Graphics Monitor 2.6 is able to monitor core voltage, memory voltage, memory I/O voltage, fan speed and temperature of the graphics core and the memory.

It can even document the measurements over time, giving the user exact information about the strain to the graphics card caused by different applications.

To improve user flexibility, Tyan built in a dynamic fan speed adjustment.

When the system is idle, the user can lower the fan speed for a quieter PC environment.

However, the TGM will intelligently increase the fan speed once the VPU temperature increases beyond the designated safe range.

For those familiar with graphic card tuning, there is the built-in slider control to over clock both the VPU and the memory speed.

Tyan's unique design includes a massive front and backside heatsink for overclocking enthusiasts.

"The Tachyon 9600 Pro shows once again that engineers at Tyan are never content with what reference designs delivers", said Victoria Chin, Marketing Manager of Tyan.

"We are listening to the wishes and requests of our customers in order to deliver even more than what was requested.

The result is excellence performance of the ATI core combined with a unique control over the graphics card".

The Tachyon 9600 Pro is now available in volume.

The recommended selling price is US $195.

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