Specifications

By now you’re probably pretty familiar with the chip the Tachyon G9700 PRO is based on (the RADEON 9700 PRO) specs. Therefore we’ll briefly list a few key aspects here, if you need further details please refer back to our preview article from the summer.

The List

ATI RADEON 9700 PRO Visual Processing Unit with 325MHz core engine
8 parallel rendering pipelines
128-bit floating-point color precision
4 parallel geometry engines
256-bit DDR memory interface
128MB DDR memory at 620MHz
SMARTSHADER 2.0 technology
SMOOTHVISION 2.0 technology
HYPERZ III technology
TRUFORM 2.0 technology
VIDEOSHADER engine
FULLSTREAM technology
AGP 8X support
DVD video playback
Dual monitor support
DVI-I (Digital flat panel support)
Video output
S-Video/Composite connector for TV/VCR

Analysis

The premise behind the Tachyon G9700 PRO is to take everything from the original RADEON 9700 PRO card and make it better. As we said in the introduction, this graphics card is geared towards gamers and hardware enthusiasts, the power users who demand the most from their graphics card.

In order to accomplish this, Tyan has implemented a more effective cooling solution on the Tachyon G9700 PRO, but more on that later. One aspect that we must address first is the clock speeds of the Tachyon card. While early reports indicated it would ship with both its memory and core clock frequencies overclocked from the factory, this is not the case. All Tachyon G9700 PRO cards will ship at the same 325MHz core/620MHz memory configuration as every other RADEON 9700 PRO card that has been released to date. We know this is probably disappointing to many of you, as some rumors had the core clock frequency as high as 400MHz!

We discussed this with Tyan and while they initially wanted to ship with higher clock speeds, it was eventually decided that the risk would be too great. Tyan simply doesn’t have the manpower to check that each and every board that leaves the factory is capable of running at the clock speeds they were shooting for. So rather than risk the potential RMAs and customer support issues they may run into, they decided to stick with the default frequencies.

Fortunately the Tachyon G9700 PRO has a few things going for it besides clock frequencies though, lets discuss Tyan’s unique cooling solution first.