Specifications

By now you’re probably pretty familiar with the specifications for the RADEON 9500 PRO core that is at the heart of Tyan’s Tachyon G9500 PRO. Therefore, rather than rehash the specs for the millionth time, we’re provided this chart which sums up its more important technical specifications in comparison to its replacement, RADEON 9600 PRO, and its competition from NVIDIA, the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra (which still hasn’t shipped to the public)

	9500 PRO	9600 PRO	GeForce FX 5600 Ultra
Core Clock	275MHz	400MHz	350MHz
Pixel Pipelines	8	4	4
Fill Rate	2200 Mpixels/sec	1600 Mpixels/sec	1400 Mpixels/sec
Texture units per pixel pipe	1	1	1
Multi-textured Fill Rate	2200 Mtexels/sec	1600 Mtexels/sec	1400 Mtexels/sec
Anti-Aliased Fill Rate	13.2 Billion AA samples/sec	9.6 Billion AA samples/sec	5.6 Billion AA samples/sec
Memory Clock	540MHz	600MHz	700MHz
Memory Bandwidth	8.8GB/sec	9.6GB/sec	11.2GB/sec

Board layout

If you recall the design of the Tachyon G9500 PRO’s older brother, the G9700 PRO, you’ll remember that with the exception of the hardware-monitoring chip (a unique feature Tyan still enjoys to this day), the G9700 PRO was largely built on ATI’s RADEON 9700 PRO reference design omitting the oversized heatsink/fan of course. “Why did it take Tyan so long to come up with this?” was one of the chief comments we received. While we can’t answer that question for the G9700 PRO, we can clearly see that Tyan has truly reworked the design of its Tachyon G9500 PRO card.

Tachyon G9500 PRO compared to ATI's RADEON 9500 PRO

Tachyon G9500 PRO card

Tachyon G9500 PRO back

For starters, Tyan has gone with a longer PCB for the Tachyon G9500 PRO. It isn’t GeForce4 Ti 4600 long, but it is longer than the reference RADEON 9500 PRO card from ATI, and even a hair longer than the RADEON 9800 PRO. You can also see that the Tachyon G9500 PRO sports an aqua blue PCB, similar to the company color. So where does the extra length go towards?

The most obvious difference is the power supply connector. Rather than place it near the Tachyon G9500 PRO’s power circuitry (as ATI has done) Tyan has placed the power connector on the edge of the card. This should give those of you with large full tower cases a little more room to work with when plugging up your Tachyon G9500 PRO’s power connection.

Power connector, speaker, and Winbond hardware monitoring

Second, we can also see that Tyan has placed an external speaker and the Winbond W83782D hardware-monitoring chip just below the external power connector. This is the first video card we’ve received in recent memory that comes with its own speaker, its purpose is to alert the user with an audible alarm if the card begins to overheat, just like the thermal protection we’ve come to expect from a motherboard!

When you consider the market Tyan is going for with the Tachyon G9500 PRO (hardware enthusiasts and overclockers), adding these features makes a lot of sense. Wouldn’t it be great if you knew when your graphics card was overheating without having to watch a hardware-monitoring utility like Tyan Graphics Monitor all the time? After all, 3D gaming is the number one activity that will stress your graphics core to its max, you can’t monitor temps and voltages if you’re busy playing Counter-Strike. That’s what the speaker is for.