Introduction

Over the past 6 months, a small but very mature video card chipset manufacturer has made its way from second rate video chipset producer to having the most powerful video chipset on the market, if you haven't guessed it yet we are talking about ATI.

ATI's move up the 3D ladder has been a rather slow one. ATI's Rage line was meant to be a high end 3D system, but was moved to mid end due to its inabilities to take on the nVidia counterparts at the time. The Radeon line was ATI's answer to a long awaited question.

Starting with the 7000 series, ATI started to show it could do what was needed, but still unable to take out the top of the 3D line due to nVidia's GeForce line. 7500, 8000, 8500 were also amongst ATI's next and impressive chips but none more so than the 9xxx series.

Released as the 9700 Pro video card, it proved to be able to remove nVidia from the top of the 3D ladder, and it continued to do so through nVidia's attempts to add AGP8x to their GeForce 4 chipsets. ATI needing something of a budget series card needed to take out a new lease on the 9xxx core. Cutting the memory bus from 256bit to 128bit was ATI's design for a mid range product. Dubbing it the 9500 series, this card has gained some pull in the 3D ranks.

Tyan has been known for quite some time as merely a server and workstation motherboard producer. With the overclocking market growing in the positive way it is, even Tyan want to move into this section, and with the 3D sector taking off, Tyan also wants a slice of that. With ATI currently being the way to go, Tyan has started to produce its own line of ATI based video cards. Today we look at the Tyan Tachyon 9500 Pro video card for the middle 3D section of the market.