Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 64MB - KYRO II (2/15)

The board

The card follows Hercules' trademark design: shimmering blue 4-layer PCB. Since there aren't very many components on the board, it looks a bit, well, empty, and the memory chips seem almost lost. The 64MB memory consists of 8 8MB modules with an access time of 5ns. We were told, however, that production boards will use 5,5ns memory. The Kyro II chip resides under a miniature "Blue Orb" type heatsink/fan combo, which does a very good job of cooling the chip: Even the back side of the card where the chip sits only ever got "lukewarm". Add to this the fact that the memory seems made for overclocking (5ns=200MHz), and we've got our hopes up to do some successful "thermally accelerated" testing. Theoretically, the Kyro should profit a lot more from overclocking its core than the GeForce 2 MX, since the MX is primarily memory limited, which the Kyro isn't, thanks to its tile based rendering technique. The overclocking tests later on in this article show the situation to be a bit more problematic, however.

Frontside	cooled by a Mini-Orb like fan	5ns SDRAM modules	Backside

As mentioned above, Powerstrip v3 Beta (B126) detects only AGP 2x support, despite the fact that the Kyro II is a fully AGP 4x compliant chip according to ST Micro. Entech, the company behind the Powerstrip tweaking tool, maintains that their tool works correctly and displays the correct AGP mode. A question and answer session with Hercules finally cleared up the situation: It seems, that AGP 4x is purposely disabled in the card's firmware for compatibility reasons with several ALi chipset based mainboards. As our benchmarks show, the Kyro can clearly hold its own even when limited to AGP 2x.

About the RAMDAC: Hercules has announced its card will use a 270MHz RAMDAC, and our pre-production sample also used this clockrate. While the image quality left nothing to be desired, Hercules is planning to ship the selling version with a 300MHz RAMDAC. Consequently any further comments I could make about image quality would not be very meaningful.

Drivers

Driver Menus - Click to enlarge

Here you can see a few screenshots of the current driver revision, v7.56 (In german language. The shots were taken on a german  machine). These will look different in the final drivers (version v8.xx) and will also offer simplified 3D settings.

Copyright: 09.04.2001 -   RIVA Station 2001 - Lars Weinand
No Copy without Permission!

Translation by Benjamin Kraft

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