|
The Tyan Tachyon 9500 Pro is
mostly similar to ATi's reference design, with the
differences being that this card is slightly longer, the PCB
is a light-blue (opposed to the typical red PCB of many Radeon cards), and the power cable placement is on the edge
of the card. What is the importance of some of
these changes? Well, the extra length of the card is
mostly attributable to the placement of the Winbond W83782D
monitoring chip and speaker placed directly beneath the
power connector in the upper right. Tyan has produced
the only Radeon cards known to support hardware monitoring.
This is used in conjunction with the Tachyon Graphic Monitor
(TGM) 2.0 software, which we will cover a bit later on.
The external speaker can alert users to potentially damaging
situations such as overheating of the VPU, a feature more
common with motherboards.
Along with the aqua blue PCB,
the aluminum heatsinks over the fan and memory chips were
also painted a vibrant blue, producing a strikingly good
looking card. Early shots of the card (and
pictures on the back of the box as well) show a much larger
and connected heatsink/fan combo. The ones actually placed
on the board were smaller, however, with an individual heatsink/fan
placed over the R300 VPU and finned heatsink strips placed
over the memory chips on the front and back of
the card. These were attached using thermal pads
and spring-loaded retention clips. The fan over the VPU can rotate at over 5000 rpm, but we found it to be
quieter than expected. For those searching for even
quieter measures, the fan speed can be lowered using the
provided TGM
2.0 software.
As seen in the pictures
above, the card has external ports supporting standard
15-pin VGA cables, S-Video, and DVI-out. Tyan is
currently looking into providing dual DVI-out ports, and we
may well see this on their next line of Tachyon cards.
Care must be taken to remember to plug in the power cable
when installing the card. Placing the power connector
on the edge in the upper corner of the card means easier routing of
power cables from other devices to the Tachyon G9500 Pro.
|
|
|
Drivers and Software |
|
Catalyst
3.2
and Tyan's TGM 2.0 |
|
ATi's
Catalyst 3.2 Drivers
We used ATi's latest Catalyst
offering when installing the Tachyon G9500 Pro, Version 3.2,
and also installed the accompanying control panel software.
The first thing that we noticed was that this card wasn't
recognized as a Radeon 9500, but as a Radeon 9700 instead.
Tyan claims that by doing this, the user will be allowed to
overclock the Tachyon G9500 Pro. As we have seen with
other Radeon 9500 cards, overclocking is normally not an
option, unless a "hacked" bios is applied. This may be
a bit extreme for some as any problem flashing the bios
could lead to a non-functioning video card. Therefore,
Tyan claims another first by natively allowing the Tachyon
G9500 Pro to be overclocked.
ATi's Catalyst
drivers are really coming into their own, providing all of
the settings that enthusiasts want and need to control the
graphical output. On the Smartgart tab, the AGP setting can be
set, as well as enabling or disabling Fast Writes. You
may note that AGP4X was the highest option listed.
This card does support AGP8X, but for the sake of keeping a
level testing field we chose a board, the Abit BH7, which
did not. We're not going to cover each and every tab,
but the two that most users will probably look at are the
Direct3D and OpenGL tabs. On these pages are all of
the options for optimizing the way games look. There
is an overall performance slider at the top, but by clicking
on the custom settings checkbox, the user can choose how
many samples of Anti-Aliasing or Anisotropic Filtering they
want to use. For our purposes, we chose all of the
highest quality settings available to us.
Tyan's Tachyon Graphics Monitor
2.0
Here's a look at
Tyan's new Tachyon Graphics Monitor 2.0 software. It
clearly shows the current speed of both the VPU and Memory,
basic system information as well as the fan speed and VPU
temperature. To overclock the card, one only needs to
simply move the sliders to the desired speeds for the VPU
and/or RAM, and then click
on 'Apply'. After confirming the speed changes, you
are off and running. The VPU temperature gauge
can be monitored in realtime to ensure that it is not
running too hot when overclocked.
To get more
detailed information about the card, we clicked on the
'Details' button. There are no less than seven
separate items that can be monitored here including: Fan
speed, Memory core voltage, Memory I/O voltage, Memory
temperatures 1 and 2 (front and back of the card,
respectively), the VPU Core voltage, and finally the VPU
temperature. What's especially helpful about these
graphs is that not only does it show the current value of
the item being monitored, but it also shows what range is
considered safe. Another nice feature found on the
detailed page was the fan speed adjustment slider.
Most users will probably feel safest keeping the fan at its
highest speeds, especially during 3D gaming when the VPU is
running its hottest. The hardware monitoring system
will automatically raise fan speeds should the VPU get too
hot, however. When the system is idle
or running 2D applications, the fan speed can be quickly
lowered to its "min" setting (about 3000 rpm) to reduce the
noise from the system.
|
|
|
Screenshots: In-Game Action |
|
Some Nice Looking Visuals |
|
EA Sports NHL 2003 Screenshots
We thought about
what game to use to throw up some eye-candy, and decided to
use EA Sports' NHL 2003 to honor the Stanley Cup Playoffs. For these
particular shots we put all the game's graphical settings at the highest
quality possible. Each screen shot was taken at a
resolution of 1600x1200 with 32-bit color, 4X Anti-Aliasing
and 4X Anisotropic
Filtering enabled. We tried using 8X AF as we had used
in the testing benchmarks, but NHL 2003 would simply close
when loading a game. When looking closely at the first
two screenshots we can see that all the edges are crisp and clean,
and the colors are vibrant. For a quick comparison without
AA applied, compare the hockey stick in the second picture
with the one in the third picture. Some quality was
lost, however, when saving these to JPEG format, so don't
confuse the images displayed with actual gaming conditions.
The main point we would like to get across is that even at
higher resolutions with AA and Anisotropic Filtering
applied, there was almost no noticeable drop in performance,
and the game played as smooth as ever. And yes, that's
me in the last frame, courtesy of EA's "put your face in the
game" technology.
The
testing setup and 3DMark scores
|
