Tyan says its Radeon 9700 Pro card better than ATI's

* WE INADVERTENTLY included the wrong picture with the first version of this story. The proper picture is now pasted below. Apologies. And now we discover the full spec is on the Tyan site. See bottom of the article for the first review we've seen.

TYAN SAID IT isn't late to the party with a Radeon 9700 Pro card it will introduce next week because it designed its own unit rather than just reselling ATI's own card.

Sources at Tyan claim other makers are just rebranding the cards ATI makes, which isn't good enough.

A somewhat bolshie attitude, but refreshing in a vendor or partner. Tyan obviously has an attitude problem...

The firm said it will intro its Tachyon G9700 Pro and include a specially tweaked overclocked driver that will mean the performance of the card kicks butt on the "other guy's" card.

Getting first to the market isn't that important and that's why Tyan claims it has taken its time before releasing the card.

The heatsink is specially designed and Tyan claims the card will clock a 400MHz core speed. The designers, Tyan said, have tweaked the board layout and the card will work with all AGP 8X chipsets, again, unlike the "other guy's".

It has hardware monitoring built into the board, which, we think, means it auto monitors how it's performing, although this appears to be propietary information.

Quite a few reports on quite a few fora have suggested that Radeon 9700 Pro cards conflict with quite a few chipsets.

The card will be pitched at around $350 or so. Here's a photo that is shown below. Meantime, a Danish site, TweakUp, appears to have a review of the card -- here. Sheesh! µ