Card appearance
Tyan are one of ATi's partners who almost refuse to go along with the complete reference design that many favour. Tyan may be better known to you as providers of some seriously powerful server / workstation kit, but their allegiance with ATi is starting to raise their profile within the graphics card industry. Let's take a look.
The box makes a suitably powerful impression; The Matrix's Trinity lookalike morphed in a Borg-like creature, and one of the card's main selling points is listed on the left-hand side. We'll discuss its prodigious monitoring functions on the following page. The most pertinent feature; 128MB of on-board memory and ATi 9600 Pro VPU immediately let you know what you're buying, assuming you're aware of just how this card fits into the overall ATi hierarchy.
There's very little that's reference about this Tyan card. It's refreshing to see a partner not bow down to the homogenous nature of ATi's cards. That alone, we reckon, will garner Tyan a number of sales, much in the mould of Hercules and its blue monster cards. The card features an integrated VPU and RAM heatsink. The benefit of this, from a manufacturer's point of view, is the easy attachment of said heatsink. However, as the VPU begins to kick out heat from being stressed, the heat will undoubtedly transfer over to the memory chips. Leadtek, amongst others, have experienced this kind of knock-on effect. It's difficult to calculate precisely whether having integrated RAMsinks is a good or bad idea.
The cooler is a slimline aluminium affair. Tyan have wisely chosen not to extend it fully down to the AGP socket, for that may cause problems with motherboards' AGP retention locks. The fan may look like any other found on numerous graphics cards, and it probably is, but it has one or two unique features that'll become apparent on the following page.
Apart from the colour and heatsink, Tyan have chosen to relocate a number of surface-mounted components. The heatsink is double-side in nature, such that it extends over to the rear side. The heatsink is constructed from two individual pieces that connect together on the rear side.
The non-reference nature of the card continues over to the rear. Let's not forget that all cards kick out heat on the rear, too, so any form of heat dispersal is appreciated. The rear side comes ways after pushing two plastic pins through.
The Tachyon G9600 is equipped with 128MB of on-board BGA memory from Hynix. Hmmm, this memory is specified to run at 3.6ns @ 2.5v, which equates to 555MHz. The board specifies 600MHz memory speed; 45MHz above rated spec. We'll see how this affects overclocking potential.
That's about as standard as a rear panel gets. Tyan, unfortunately, scrapped plans to manufacture a dual DVI model, much to our disappointment.
