Hercules 3d prophet II gts 32meg
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Introduction: Let me start out this review by saying….”This is one FAST CARD!!” But then you peeps knew that was coming right? Ok, lets get down to business. First and foremost, I have the Hercules 3d prophet II gts 32meg version. Most everyone knows that the Hercules company was bought out by the Guillemot corporation. Hercules had previously manufactured, in my opinion one of the fastest and highest quality TNT2 Ultra’s in it’s day. Unfortunately, financial woe’s struck the company and they went under. Props out to Guillemot for bringing them back to life for the most part.
Street Price: $349 Retail and up!
Manufacturer: Hercules Website is http://www.hercules.com/
Availability: Now in many stores, and on-line.
Reviewed: June 2000
Introduction: Let me start out this review by saying….”This is one FAST CARD!!” But then you peeps knew that was coming right? Ok, lets get down to business. First and foremost, I have the Hercules 3d prophet II gts 32meg version. Most everyone knows that the Hercules company was bought out by the Guillemot corporation. Hercules had previously manufactured, in my opinion one of the fastest and highest quality TNT2 Ultra’s in it’s day. Unfortunately, financial woe’s struck the company and they went under. Props out to Guillemot for bringing them back to life for the most part.
Overview: First off, the first thing your going to notice on this bad bye is the combination of the blue PCB and the blue anodized heat sinks. They are a site to behold to say the least. To my knowledge, Hercules are the first guys to stray from the path and do something a little different here. What do I think you say?? Well, I just love the shiz!! Does it make the card run faster or more stable?? Most likely not. But when you pull the side off of your casa, she is the first thing that hits your eyes, and man is she pretty!! You'll see the main heatsink on the chips core itself is blue, along with all of the memory chips also, front and back. One thing that caught my attention right off the bat was the WEAKASS fan that was sitting atop the heatsink. Now my roommate just shelled out over $370 dollars of his hard earned JACK for this bad boy and we wanted this thing to run cool but we did not necessarily want to initiate any "freaky" cooling on this. We quickly jumped into the ol' computer tool box and found a leftover 40mm fan just sitting there, begging to replace the stock fan on this GTS. We screwed the baby on, spliced the wires and were quickly in business, pulling at least twice the air from the heatsink as the original. Here are some HOMEBREW pics of the mods. Nothing serious, but something to give the average overclocker a sense of accomplishment nevertheless.
Next up are the normal screens you will see when you go into this vid cards properties. Hercules has just "officially" released their own Detonator 2 drivers, better known as the 5.22 drivers. Very nice on their part. I love running all the beta/leaked drivers, but when your hardware manufacturer supports them, you cannot hardly go wrong.
And here is the one we really want to see right?? One word....OVERCLOCKING!!
I nearly soiled myself when I saw the default frequencies with which this card was running. In this review we are going to run this Geforce2 GTS up against the Hercules Prophet SE sdr version. Fair?? Not really, but hey, that's all we have to work with here at the OCA secret laboratories. The reason I mention this however is the geforce1 has a default speed of 112mhz core and 143mhz mem clock. This goes to show you how far NVIDIA has come in the months since the original geforce was released. Absolutely incredible. Ok, enough on this subject. I have benched the hell outta these 2 cards, so lets get down to business shall we??
Benchmarks: I am going to benchmarks this card against the Hercules Geforce256 sdr version, using 3dmark2000 and Quake3. Benches were run using the following system.
CPU: P3 600e (running both 600mhz and 810mhz)
Memory: 128megs Micron pc100
Mobo: Abit BE6-2
Hardrive: Maxtor 30gig ATA/66 (7,200rpm)
CD-Rom: Kenwood 52x
Sound: Diamond MX-300
That's about it, nothing else really matters right?? Here we go.
I'm gonna start off with 3dmark scores. Below are scores at 600mhz.
Not too shabby. We see that the GTS2 is of course outperforming the Original Geforce256 in every aspect. We do see the GTS2 take quite a hit when it comes to 32bit color though.
Lets see what we get at 800mhz.
Wow!! Quite a jump in scores here. The GTS2 is breaking a whopping 7000 marks!! Not bad at all, over a full 2000 more marks than the Geforce256. Still taking a major hit when it comes to 32bit scores though. Moreso, it seems, than the Geforce256, ona those things that make ya go....hmmmmmm. Anyways, On to the quake3 scores baby!!
All Q3benches run at default settings, unless specified and simple items on.
Now this is something. Do you see the Geforce256 actually beating out the GTS2 in the "fastest" setting?? I could not hardly believe my eyes, and yes, I double checked and triple checked myself here. These readings are VERY correct and on the mark. However, we do see the GTS2 kicking some SERIOUS ass when it comes to the higher resolutions. Can you believe the GTS2 is pumping out a whopping 130FPS on High Quality?? Holy shiz batman!! I was floored. At 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 the GTS2 doubles what the Prophet SE is putting out. This is telling us 1 thing guys. The GTS2 was built from the ground up to be a badass at high resolutions, no doubt about it.
Next: Conclusion >>
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