X-bit labs

TYAN Tachyon G9700 Pro Graphics Card Review

Category: Video

by Michail Djagterev

[ 03/30/2003 | 01:41 PM ]

TYAN Company famous for its server mainboards, started the VGA business a while ago. We have already reviewed their Tachyon G9000 solution, but today we would like to offer you a new exciting coverage of the product based on ATI Radeon 9700 Pro chip.

Table of contents:

• Package
  
• Closer Look: Tachyon G9700 Pro Graphics Card
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance
  
• Quake3 Arena
  
• Unreal Tournament 2003
  
• 3DMark 2001SE
  
• AquaMark 2.0
  
• Conclusion
  

Graphics processing units from ATI have come into production lines of many graphics card makers now. Not only the giants of the industry, like Gigabyte, but also other companies, less known in this field, enter the market with their own version of a RADEON based card. Thus, TYAN is mostly known for its server platforms, but recently the company has become a player in the graphics cards market. As you know from our previous reviews, TYAN introduced its first graphics card last summer. That one was based on ATI RADEON 9000 Pro (see our article called ATI RADEON 9000 Pro: TYAN Tachyon G9000 Graphics Card Review). Today we are going to deal with another member of the Tachyon series. It’s TYAN Tachyon G9700 PRO card based on ATI RADEON 9700 Pro graphics chip.

You know, one of the simplest ways to make a graphics card “special” without re-designing its PCB is to mount a big and nice-looking cooler onto the graphics chip :). Yeah, a big cooler usually doesn’t require any modification of the circuitry, while the overall card appearance becomes much more impressive. So, those users who dream about overclocking the graphics chip and getting some extra fps in 3D games may succumb to the temptation and buy such a card. What would they buy? Let’s check it out with the help of TYAN Tachyon G9700 Pro.

Package

The retail version of the TYAN Tachyon G9700 Pro graphics card comes in a big paper box.

The package also includes a user’s manual, a CD with drivers, DVI-to-VGA and S-Video-to-Composite adapters, Composite-to-Composite and S-Video-to-S-Video cables and also a PC-Plug power cable.

Overall, we have everything necessary to use the card and yet… We guess a few more CDs with games and other software would be appropriate here. RADEON 9700 Pro based cards are far from being low-cost now, so manufacturers aren’t usually stingy about various supplements like full versions of modern 3D games and video processing software.

Anyway, the graphics card is the main thing so let’s not look into the package too long. We’d better turn to Tyan Tachyon G9700 PRO itself.

Closer Look: Tachyon G9700 Pro Graphics Card

The specs of the card exactly follow the reference design from ATI. Tyan Tachyon carries 128MB of DDR SDRAM and works at the standard 325MHz/620MHz frequencies. At first sight it looks different from widely-spread SAPPHIRE RADEON 9700 PRO cards as it’s lacquered blue, not red as most other RADEON based products. But if we take a closer look at the card we will see that it follows exactly the same reference-design from ATI as most other RADEON 9700 PRO based cards.

A definitely interesting thing to point out about the TYAN's graphics card is that the Tachyon G9700 PRO comes equipped with on-board hardware monitoring function that is able to monitor fan, voltage as well as temperatures of the VPU and memory. Users can view this information via good-looking TYAN Graphics Monitor software bundled with the product. Maybe you think that the feature is not really a necessary one, however, we believe it is always better to have a feature rather than not to have it. Furthermore, TYAN's Tachyon G9700 PRO does not really cost considerably more than competing solutions, but is the only one that offers us to monitor itself. Why not monitor it for free?