Preview: Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 with KYRO II (1/2)

Everybody´s talking about NVIDIA and their revolutionary new GeForce 3 chip at the moment. But earnings are pretty low in this High-End Segment at the moment. The money is made in the mid-range Mainstream sector with GeForce 2 MX and RADEON VE. Only on thing´s imoportant here: Nice MHz and MB numbers and cheap prices. And now there´s a new competitor playing in that league: ST Micro´s new Direct 3D and OpenGL compatible Kyro II which comes with the new Hercules 3D Prophet 4500.

The Kyro II chip and the 64MB 128Bit SDRAM memory are clocked at 175MHz - almost GeForce 2 MX values. Only the RAMDAC seems to be a weak for higher resolutions with only 270MHz.

The AGP 2X board comes with the typical blue Hercules board layout. The .18 Micron chip is cooled by an orb-like cooling fan. Here´s the yet available technical data of the new card compared to GeForce 2 MX:

The card comes with:

• 2D/3D-Graphics Card based on the Kyro-2-Chip of STMicrolelectronics with 64 MB SDR-RAM-Memory
• Manual
• Installation-CD-ROM (Drivers for W9x and Windows 2000)

The KYRO II 3D chip is no traditional chip. It is a "Tiler". More on that on the next page:

Copyright: 09.03.2001 -   RIVA Station 2001 - Lars Weinand
No Copy without Permission!

URL of this Article: www.rivastation.com/prophet4500_prev_e.htm - If you want to link to it, please use this URL! :-)