LOSTCIRCUITS

Summary

Standing out from the crowd of "Powered by ATI" manufacturers is Tyan, the only manufacturer whose cards are significantly deviating from the ATI reference design. In addition to presenting itself in "Royal Blue", the TACHYON also claims to be the fastest RADEON spawn, courtesy of its overclocking margin of up to 400 MHz core frequency. Another advertised feature is the built-in hardware monitor. We took the TACHYON G9700 Pro and gave it some heavy beating, pushing it beyond the 400 MHz mark which gave us up to 17 % performance boost over the default setting. We did find some "hot issues" as well, though, but we also found how to avoid them.

A tachyon is a particle moving faster than the speed of light and, therefore falls into the category of antimatter. Needlesss to say that it moves backward in time.

Amongst the many reasons for nVidia's success in the graphics market has been that they merely supplied the graphics chips to their partners who, in turn, manufactured the cards, did the PR and had the burden of sales and distribution. Certainly, the gross profits on selling a single IC only as opposed to selling the entire package are somewhat less, on the other hand, history has shown that the concept is extremely successful.

Some partners have not survived the onslaught of the competition within their own camp and disappeared, some have resurfaced under a different brand name, last not least some have reappeared under different names with a changed product line, that is, featuring ATI products now instead of nVidia. The proof of the concept has further recruited a number of different players who had previously abstained from the graphics market, or played a very subordinate role at best.

Names like FIC come to mind, one of the prime partners of ATI also in the integrated graphics market. Most prominent, however, amongst the newcomers in the graphics market is Tyan, otherwise established primarily in the enterprise server market. Keep in mind that regardless of whether there is an entire new group within the company, dedicated to do graphics and nothing but graphics, there is still a certain handicap compared to those manufacturers that have had years of experience in that particular market. On the other hand, how much, beyond using the reference drivers supplied by the "Mother Organization" can be done? There is always the possibility of using a new pretty or not so pretty GUI for the custom driver interface but by the end of the day, nobody really cares about these customized layouts anyway since they will work only with the drivers originally supplied with the graphics cards, Those will be, in more than 90% of all cases, obsolete by the date of purchase of the card anyway.

If it is not the software that can be used to make a splash, it's got to be the hardware. Hardware in this case circumscribes anything that is physically part of the graphics adapter, regardless of whether it is the PCB, the resistor network configuration, some additional filters or else something as trivial as the heat spreader used. Considering the lack of hard definitions, we even consider the choice of color a hardware issue.

Next Page:    => Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue =>