![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Tuesday , December 17, 2002
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Sean Quinn
- Google +1
Tyan Tachyon G9700 Pro
Tyan is making an introduction into the graphics card community. They are pushing forward with a series of ATI Powered video cards engineered for the hardcore gamer and overclocker. This is our PREview of their 9700 based engineering sample.
Introduction
Tyan Computer Corporation was founded thirteen years ago in 1989 by ex-Intel and IBM executive, Dr. T. Symon Chang. This means that from the start, Tyan was founded with great experience coming from Dr. Chang. Tyan has operations located in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. They are most known for their mainboard products. These are not the kind of motherboards tweakers such as you and I would look for on our home desktop computers. Tyan’s motherboards have always been sparse of tweakability options such as voltage adjustments, FSB adjustments, and memory timings. Instead, their motherboards have been of a high caliber aimed for the OEM and Systems Integrators market as well as very high end servers. In that regard, they are well known for system stability and quality high end products. The overclocking crowd has never really known Tyan.
That is about to change though. In today’s technology economy, diversification is necessary. Sticking to one product can lead to slowdowns of profit, as profit margins are tight on certain products. Tyan has decided to embrace the graphics card market and make a lasting introduction. When deciding what graphics chip to go with today for the best performance and features, there's no contest to ATI’s Radeon 9700 Pro. Tyan is aiming to make itself known in the hardcore gaming crowd with the introduction of their Tachyon Series of graphics cards.
You hear the word Tachyon used in a lot of sci-fi shows and movies. As soon as I saw that word, I was immediately reminded of some Star Trek episodes. What is a Tachyon? "A common term among physics gurus, the term "Tachyon" is defined as a theoretical sub-atomic particle that always travels faster than the speed of light."
Here is what Tyan is saying about their new Tachyon G9700 Pro video card.
The Tachyon G9700 Pro is the new weapon of choice for the elite gamer, enthusiast, power user, and graphics developer! Featuring the ATI® RADEON™ 9700 PRO visual processing unit (VPU), the first processor to fully support DirectX 9.0 and OpenGL 1.3 functionality, the Tachyon G9700 Pro graphics card equips your imagination with sophisticated real-time rendering that rivals that of cinematic feature films. Tachyon G9700 Pro users also benefit from 128MB of DDR memory, best-in-class 3D gaming, complex and realistic lighting effects, dual-display support, and an industry-leading software suite.
One of the most intriguing things about this video card is that it has hardware monitoring.
"The Tachyon G9700 PRO is the only RADEON 9700 PRO-based graphics card on the market with hardware monitoring! The Tachyon Graphics Monitor is a user-friendly system monitoring utility that allows the user to monitor and regulate fan, voltage, and temperature."
Hardware
Tyan's box art is very eye-catching. The major points regarding this card are listed on the front. On the back of the box there are brief descriptions as to what those features will actually do for you. The card is packaged well and is inside an anti-static bag put between two foam pads for protection. A manual, CD, and cables are included. Tyan provides an S-video to composite adapter, S-Video cable, composite video cable, and DVI to VGA adapter.
There are two things you will notice immediately upon viewing this video card. The first is that the color of the PCB is not red like what ATI uses in their designs, but instead a blue which Tyan has decided to use. Whether red or blue, both colors actually look very striking on the 9700 Pro. The second major thing you will notice is the cooling system used on the Tachyon G9700 Pro. You also have your standard VGA, DVI, and TV-Out ports available.
Taking a closer look at the HSF unit covering the VPU, we can see that this is one whole piece that cools the RAM as well as the VPU held on by spring loaded push pins. The pins connect all the way through to the back heatsink, pulling it up onto the card as well. In the third picture above you can see that the two heatsinks actually do touch each other, allowing for thermal transfer of heat between them. Tyan even did away with the standard back plate used on ATI’s cards and used a real heatsink with small fins.
I first dissected the bottom heatsink to take a good look underneath. As you can see from the first picture, there are four thermal pads used to transfer heat from the RAM on the back. They used a lot of this material so that the whole RAM chip would come into contact firmly with this material. It works very well, too. In the second picture you can see where the material actually took the wording of the RAM chip embedded into it when I took it off. This showed that the RAM chips were definitely getting enough pressure applied to them to come in contact with the thermal material. In the third picture check out the little circle that extrudes from the heatsink. This actually comes down into contact with the same thermal material applied to the back of the core. As you can see in the last picture above, it has a good amount of pressure to it. It made an indention into the material, meaning it has very good contact.
(Editor's Note: I still want to look into the TIMs being used here further and see just what the specs are on the material. I am still far from being sold on one-piece cooling units even being able to do their job well on a card that has five individual mating surfaces to properly adhere to.)
Taking off the heatsink/fan combo on the top of the card, we find it uses the same thermal material for the RAM. A generous amount is there with appropriate pressure applied to make good contact with the RAM. You can also see on the heatsink that the VPU made very good contact with the heatsink's thermal material for the core. You can see that when I removed the heatsink the VPU is covered adequately in the thermal material as well. The RAM used is Samsung BGA rated at 2.8ns.