The card
Like the rest of its graphics line, Tyan's Tachyon G9600 Pro is blue with just the slightest hint of turquoise. For other manufacturers, brightly colored cards are par for the course. However, Tyan's traditionally conservative reputation makes the blue Tachyons stand out all the more.

A shot from the front...

And the rear

The Tachyon G9600 Pro's most distinctive feature is undoubtedly its double-sided heat sink, which wraps over the top of the card and is cooled by a single, variable-speed fan. More on the fan later.

It's also worth mentioning that the Tachyon G9600 Pro differs from ATI's reference design for the Radeon 9600 Pro. While other manufacturers are content to slap their own stickers, board colors, or maybe a custom heat sink onto graphics cards that are essentially carbon copies of ATI's reference design, Tyan goes the extra mile and actually tweaks the reference design's layout and component mix.

Popping off the heat sink reveals a standard TIM pad, which isn't what I prefer, but I can live with it.

Thankfully, the card doesn't use a GPU shim that might otherwise create clearance problems for razor-thin thermal compound applications. The TIM residue isn't hard to get rid of, either; a dab of rubbing alcohol on a Q-tip will do.

With a heat sink so large, Tyan has to be careful about making metal-on-metal contact with the card's board-mounted components. Rubber pads are used between the heat sink and memory chips, which creates a comfortable gap between the heat sink and card, but may compromise memory cooling in the process. Generally speaking, attaching a heat sink to a memory chip should help the chip run cooler. However, because the Tachyon G9600 Pro's massive heat sink links the GPU and memory heat sinks, heat from the GPU may makes its way over to the memory chips and actually result in higher memory chip temperatures.

Speaking of memory chips, the Tachyon G9600 Pro uses HY5DU283222 F-36 memory chips from Hynix. Curiously, the chips are only rated for operation at 275MHz—25MHz lower than the Radeon 9600 Pro's prescribed 300MHz (600MHz DDR) memory clock speed. Tyan clocks the Tachyon G9600 Pro's memory at 300MHz anyway and even provides an overclocking utility, so they're obviously confident that the chips can handle 300MHz. How far these chips can be clocked beyond 300MHz remains to be seen.

The Tachyon G9600 Pro we're looking at today is equipped with standard DVI, VGA, and S-Video output ports, but the big news is that Tyan will also make a version available with dual DVI outputs.

And there was much rejoicing.

No, really. This is huge. The Tachyon G9600 Pro will be the first consumer-level, ATI-based graphics card to offer dual DVI output ports. To date, only Matrox's poor 3D performers and a rare GeForce here and there have offered dual DVI output ports. As digital LCD displays become more popular, dual DVI outputs will only become more desirable, making the Tachyon G9600 Pro more forward-looking than the competition.