SUMMARY: Not everyone is in the position to be able to go out and spend $500 on the latest high-end graphics card based on chips from ATI or nVidia. For this very reason ATI created the Radeon 9600 Pro, the upgrade from the Radeon 9500 Pro, which offers respectable performance at an affordable price. Today Cameron "Sov" Johnson takes a look at the Radeon 9600 Pro in the form of the Tachyon G9600 Pro from Tyan. Does it have enough horse-power to run today's latest games? Read on and find out!
Introduction
Over the past 6-8 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. Their 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. 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 were still unable to take out the top of the 3D line due to nVidia’s GeForce boards. 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, this 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 AGP 8x to their GeForce 4 chipset. ATI needing something of a budget series card needed to take out a new lease on the 9xxx core. Cutting the memory bus from 256-bit to 128-bit was ATI’s design for the mid range. 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 swing towards overclockers, Tyan wanted to move into this section; and with the 3D sector taking off, Tyan also wanted a slice of that. With ATI being the way to go, Tyan has started to produce its own line of ATI based cards. We have already looked at Tyan’s first mid-range card, the G9500 Pro video card and today we take a look at the next step in the field with the G9600 Pro video card.
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