The Radeon 9000 core was meant as a replacement for the Radeon 8500. At the same time, Radeon 9000-based cards have been priced to compete with NVIDIA's GeForce4 MX family. A good deal on the face of it, considering that the Radeon 9000 sports full DirectX 8.1 functionality, while the GeForce4 MX-based products are, misleadingly, only DirectX 7.0 compliant.

Tyan's take on the Radeon 9000 clocks in at an impressive 275 MHz core / 550 MHz memory. With 4 pixel pipelines, and each pipeline being able to process a single texture per pass, the Tachyon G9000 PRO can claim a pixel fill rate of 1100 Mpixels/sec, and a texel fill rate of 1100 Mtexels/sec. Note however, that the Radeon 9000 PRO can "loop-back" up to 6 times to apply additional textures or shader operations to each pixel before writing the result to the frame buffer. This should result in better fill rate than the paper spec, although how much better is likely dependant on the application.

As far as size goes, the G9000 PRO is average for a video card, about the same size as our Gainward GeForce4 Ti4200. Also note the blue PCB, which is pretty! But, just like the stickers that a ricer plasters his "ride" with, the blue PCB doesn't result in any additional speed. Speaking of blue things, you can see that Tyan has provided a color co-ordinated HSF, which keeps the Tachyon nice and cool, and our ears nice and happy.

Tyan has provided us with the standard set of outputs; DB-15, DVI, and S-Video. Surprised? We weren't. What did surprise us, though, was the fact that Tyan chose to include both a composite video cable, and S-Video cable, and a S-Video to Composite converter, yet chose not to include a DVI-to-VGA converter. Funny, we thought dual display setups would have been more common than video capturing.

2D should be nice and crisp, assuming that the boards build quality and RF filter are a match for the dual 400 MHz RAMDACs that are an integrated part of the Radeon 9000 core. Any combination of resolutions and refresh rates should be within reach with these puppies.

As for software, Tyan packages a copy of WinDVD and nothing more. That's fine by us: we usually just turf software bundles anyway.

We mentioned that the Tachyon G9000 PRO was cheap, right? How cheap? About $95 cheap, actually. That's good value.