ATI made quite a racket about the shift of its business model from card maker to graphics chip supplier a year or two ago, but in reality this has had little impact on the card production process. Nearly every single RADEON 9800 and 9600 series card has come from the same factory, despite the branding, but one company has taken it upon themselves to implement its own card designs.
That company is Tyan and the redesigned board layout has been done to enable the inclusion of hardware monitoring. And not just some poxy little temperature probe either, the TACHYON G9600 PRO is capable of monitoring temperatures, fan speeds and voltages on both the core and memory chips. It adds heavy duty features like a damn loud beepy alarm that kicks in if your fan dies, and the monitoring is all linked in with overclocking software.
Performance-wise, the TACHYON G9600 PRO performs just like any other RADEON 9600 PRO. It has the same 400MHz core and 600MHz memory speed as other cards, but it differentiates itself through the hardware monitoring features, which make it one of the most robust video cards to have passed through the <i>Atomic</i> labs. We found the core to have damn nice overclocking headroom, running stably with a core speed of 520MHz but the memory speed could only be pushed to 630MHz in Tyan’s monitoring software.
The TACHYON G9600 PRO is a welcome addition to the market, showing that innovation in the video card manufacturing realm does still exist. Rather than being a useless novelty item, the hardware monitoring is very handy. Overclockers will probably shirk at the low RAM overhead but if you want a card with a long, reliable lifespan, then Tyan has delivered a doozy.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012