Review: Hercules 3D Prophet II PRO (2/7)

Good cooling

The GeForce PRO is based on the same design as the 32MB version. This makes it quite hard to tell the two boards apart and you can only tell the difference upon closer inspection of the shimmering blue PCB. As has become typical for Hercules boards, the memory chips are passively cooled by heatsinks, while a powerful fan keeps the GeForce2 chip cool. Unfortunately, the fan doesn't support hardware monitoring. A Brooktree BT689KRF chip handles the TV-Out.

Drivers

Hercules is lagging quite a bit behind at the moment, driver-wise. Their current shipping release is based on the NVIDIA reference driver v5.32 and not the more recent Detonator 3 drivers. Since the newer drivers are optimized for the GeForce2 generation, this means that Hercules is basically letting potential performance that newer drivers could deliver go unused. There isn't really any reason for not adopting the newer drivers, since all Hercules does to personalize their releases is to swap the NVIDIA logos for its own. So it shouldn't present much of a challenge to release a newer driverset. You can find screenshots of the current release in our review of the Hercules 32MB GTS card. Since then neither the look&feel nor the functionality have changed.

Hot memory

The driver's TV-Out support is still quite unsatisfactory. This has repeatedly been a point of criticism since our reviews of the 32MB and 64MB GTS boards. DualView is as absent, as is a tool to regulate overscan on TV's to stretch the picture and make it fit the screen. This leaves you with a black frame around your picture on most PAL TV's. Fortunately there are freeware tools on the internet that get the job done. TV-Tool is a prime example. But: The latest version of this tool is no longer freeware! (Get an older freeware version in the files -> tools section on this site).

Overclocking

It ends at beforce 403MHz !!!!

I was surprised to find the card was basically "un-overclockable". I could only push the memory 3 MHz over stock speed before it started freezing my system and producing visual artifacts, a condition that could only be cured with a system restart. I have the sneaking suspicion that this is a kind of built-in overclocking limiter due to a limited oscillator? There is no real logical reason for this behavior. The GeForce 2 Ultra exhibits similar "symptoms", but only starting above 500MHz! Do they want to keep a distance to the expensive Ultra!? Manufacturers wouldn't make many friends with a step like this. Please let me stress that this is only speculation on my part! I will try to follow up on this. I mean, it's just as possible that the card I was testing had a defective BIOS or something of the sort. (Sharky was able to overclock his Hercules 3D Prophet II PRO up to 220/445. But they did not use the actual v5.32 Hercules drivers in their review. They´ve tested with NVIDIA reference drivers v6.31. Too bad whe had the card only for a very short time. I can´t check this at this time but I´m in contact with Hercules about that issue).

Copyright: 03.11.2000 -   RIVA Station 2000 - Lars Weinand
No Copy without Permission!

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