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Hercules Titanium Cards


Date
: 02/28/02 – 08:33:48 PM

Author
:

Category
: Video Cards

Page 1 : Introduction

Manufacturer: Hercules
Price GeForce2 Ti : around $110
Price GeForce3 Ti200 : around $190
Price GeForce3 Ti500 : around $390

Introduction

Overclockers Online is back with another stunning video card article folks. Actually, it's more like a small roundup. I know we've been squeezing out quite a lot of video card review lately. Do you remember the Prolink GF2 Ti? And the InnoVISION GeForce3 Ti200? All these cards performed excellent in our benchmarks. And today, we present you two more video cards. This time, Hercules has the chance to prove itself again here at O² as a top video card manufacturer.

We're going put their GeForce2 Titanium and the GeForce3 Titanium 200 on the test bench for you guys. Maybe terms like 3D Prophet II and III sound familiar to you? Well that's how Hercules likes to call their video card line. And these are exactly the ones we're going to discuss today.

Hercules has always managed to manufacture state of the art and highly tweakable (overclockable) gaming cards based on several popular GPUs. But these days it's very hard to be original and the line between success and failure is very thin. For example … If you have to choose one out of two equally priced GF3 Ti200 video cards, which one would you pick? The most tweakable one or the one that doesn't overclock that well? I would say the first ;)

Hercules sure has a way of making their cards look so damn sexy. Do you remember the blue PCB on older Hercules products we reviewed a while back? Well, these two Titanium cards we're looking at now have the same sleek look. Both cards come with heatsinks on the memory and a big-ass orb cooler on the GPU.

Got your attention yet? Let's check them out!

Page 2 : GF2 Ti

Hercules 3D Prophet II Titanium

Specifications

Graphics processor

nVidia GeForce2 Titanium GPU

Memory

64MB on-board DDR RAM memory

Bus

AGP 2X/4X

Memory interface

128-bit DDR

Memory clock speed

- 200MHz DDR RAM (operating at 400MHz),
- 250MHz qualified DDR RAM (-4ns)

Core clock speed

250MHz

Internal chipset bandwidth

8GB/s

Brute rendering architecture

- 4 pixel pipelines
- 2 texels for each pipeline
- 2,000Mtexels/s

3D acceleration features enhancements

Hardware T&L

Special effects

- Cube environmental mapping
- Bump mapping
- Hardware Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA)
- Vertex blending
- Texture compression
- Lighting, Shading?

RAMDAC/Pixel cycle

350MHz

Output options

- High-resolution TV encoder (up to 800×600)
- VGA Output

Supported API(s)

- DirectX© & OpenGL©

Bundled Software

- Hercules 3D Tweaker? 2.4
- Hercules Quake3 level (H3ShoDne map)
- PowerDVD? 3.0
- 3Deep©

Detailed Specs

The Hercules 3D Prophet II Titanium features the GeForce2 Ti GPU from nVidia. But I guess you already knew that by now ;) The Titanium version of the GeForce2 only differs slightly from the older GeForce2 line. I'm referring to the GeForce2 GTS, the GeForce2 Pro and GeForce2 Ultra.

With a default core clock of 250MHz and a memory speed of 400MHz, the 3D Prophet Titanium is a tad faster compared to a GeForce2 Pro but still slower when we compared it to a GeForce2 Ultra. That's because the memory of a GF2 Ultra is clocked at 460MHz which is 60MHz above the GF2 Ti specs. And because memory bandwidth is a serious issue on GF2 video cards, this 60MHz advantage enables the GF2 Ultra to outperform a GF2 Ti by quite a bit.

Here's a quote from our first GF2 Ti review a little while ago. The quote tells you more about the differences between the GF2 GPUs in general :

When we look at the Hercules 3D Prophet II Titanium, we see a sweet blue PCB on which the GPU, memory chips and other stuff are mounted. The center of the PCB is the GF2 Ti GPU covered by a pretty large active cooler that looks a lot like the original blue orb from Thermaltake. The engineers from Hercules have decided to mount RAM sinks onto the memory chips as well. We don't see these on GF2 Ti cards very often. RAM sinks will add to the overclocking potential of this card … that's for sure!

So far nothing but good things … A GF2 Ti GPU, 64MB of 4ns DDR RAM, RAM sinks, a blue PCB, … And that's not all. The 3D Prophet II Ti also features a TV-Out option which enables you to view your Windows desktop on your TV-screen with a resolution of up to 800×600. A nice feature that I use very often myself. However I do want to make one small remark about the TV-Out here. The GF2 Ti can only give us a resolution of 800×600 which is not bad if you don't have a huge TV-set. Otherwise, the image on the TV-screen will get all blurry and provide you with some serious head-ache if you look at it for a very long time.

Now what can we find inside a 3D Prophet II Titanium retail box?

- The GF2 Ti card
- User manual
- TV-Out connector
- Driver CD
- PowerDVD 3 + user manual
- Some colorful stickers

This sure looks like a nice package, doesn't it? All the stuff I just mentioned is packed in a solid box featuring the almighty scary skull we see on all boxes of the 3D Prophet Titanium line-up. I'm sure some kids will have sleeping disorders after looking at this box ;) But anyway, the user manual inside the box is very general. It's the exact same manual in all 3D Prophet boxes. That's not such a good thing because it doesn't include information that is typical about the card you just bought. On top of that, the tiny manual doesn't even describe the installation process for Windows XP users.

he driver CD however contains some interesting goodies. Of course, it holds the drivers for the card, but also some other things. You get the H3ShoDne Quake3 map featuring a playable level especially designed for Hercules. The map has special high quality textures as well as a complex geometry. You can use this map to demonstrate the power of your video card. Another interesting application we see on the driver CD is the Hercules 3D Tweaker. That's what Hercules likes to call its video card tweaking utility that allows you to enable or disable Vsync for Direct3D and OpenGL. You can manually select the Anti-Aliasing mode or set it to soft control (it means auto-mode) and there's a core and memory speed adjuster to overclock you video card to the max. You can change the AGP speed to 1x, 2x or 4x and enable Fast Writes (if these options are enabled in the BIOS) as well. The package also includes a full version of PowerDVD 3.0. This is my favorite application to watch DVD movies on the PC.

That's just about everything I wanted to tell you about the 3D Prophet II Titanium … let's continue with the 3D Prophet III Titanium 200! It's only a mouse-click away …

Page 3 : GF3 Ti200

Hercules 3D Prophet III Titanium 200

Specifications

Graphics processor

nVidia GeForce3 Ti200 GPU

Memory

64MB on-board DDR RAM memory

Bus

AGP 2X/4X

Memory interface

128-bit DDR

Memory clock speed

- 200MHz DDR RAM (operating at 400MHz)
- 250MHz qualified DDR RAM (-4ns)

Core clock speed

175MHz

Internal chipset bandwidth

5.6GB/s

Brute rendering architecture

- 4 pixel pipelines
- 2 texels for each pipeline
- 1,400Mtexels/s

3D acceleration features enhancements

- DirectX8 Programmable Vertex Shaders
- DirectX8 Programmable Pixel Shaders
- Hardware T&L

Special effects

- Environmental Bump mapping
- Shadow buffer technology to produce life-like shadows in real time
- 3D textures for enhanced volumetric effects
- High resolution anti-aliasing (HRAA) with fluid frame rates

RAMDAC/Pixel cycle

350MHz

Output options

- High-resolution TV encoder (up to 1024×768)
- VGA Output

Supported API(s)

- DirectX© 8.1 & OpenGL©

Bundled Software

- Hercules 3D Tweaker? 2.4
- Hercules Quake3 level (H3ShoDne map)
- PowerDVD? 3.0
- 3Deep©
- NVIDIA Demos

Detailed Specs

Because all three video cards in the Hercules Titanium line-up have been released at the same time, the boxes as well as board layout look very similar. The skeleton art on the box is back and the blue PCB with blue HSF and blue RAM sinks will also sound very familiar. I guess that's how you can recognize the 3D Prophet line-up from miles away these days.

As you can derive from the name of the card, this 3D Prophet III Titanium 200 is based on nVidia's GeForce3 Ti200 GPU. Although the Ti200 looks very much like the original GeForce3 GPU, there are some small differences.

We told you a lot about this in our previous GeForce3 Ti200 reviews so you might want to check these for more details. And because I don't want you to click away just yet, I will give you a small copy/past from that review :

The 3D Prophet III Titanium 200 video card comes with 64MB of 4ns DDR RAM. On top of the memory chips we see blue RAM sinks to cool them down especially when you start your overclocking adventure. The standard blue orb style HSF on the GF3 Ti200 GPU should also enable us to tweak this card well beyond the specs. But we'll see about that later. I just put that line in to make you curious ;) All this blue sweetness is mounted on a blue PCB. But I already mentioned that earlier, didn't I?

The card features TV-Out with a maximum resolution of 1024×768. Remember that the GF2 Ti could only deliver 800×600? I must say that the higher resolution of the GF3 Ti200 is quite noticeable on my TV-screen. Let's say it's better than I had hoped for.

Let's have a look inside the retail 3D Prophet III Ti 200 box. Here's a list of what you should expect :

- The GF3 Ti200 card
- User manual
- TV-Out connector
- Driver CD
- PowerDVD 3 + user manual
- Some colorful stickers

I can hear you say : "Isn't that the exact same stuff we found inside the 3D Prophet II Ti package?". Well, you absolutely right! Apart from the video card, the inside of all Titanium packages is exactly the same. By doing things like this, Hercules saves a lot of money on the packaging but in my opinion it's not the right thing to do towards your customers.

Page 4 : Overclocking

Overclocking

Aaaah finally we have reached the important part in this review … overclocking! I know many of you guys just skip the first parts of the review and immediately start reading this one. You guys should be ashamed of yourselves! … hehe just kidding :) I often catch myself doing that same thing too. But who cares anyway, let's continue with the review …

There are several roads to follow when overclocking a video card. You could download and install the Coolbits registry hack which allows you to adjust the core and memory speed from within the driver settings tab in your OS. OR you could crank up the core clock and memory speed of your card by installing Powerstrip or any other video card overclocking software. In most cases, we prefer to use the Coolbits registry hack because this doesn't require any additional software and is very easy to use. But today, we decided to check out the Hercules 3D Tweaker software. This small app allows you to set the core speed all the way up to 245MHz with a memory speed of up to 560MHz. This should be more than enough to max out every GeForce2 and GeForce3-based cards available.

It's really important that you increase the core clock and memory speed in small increments. This way you can determine when exactly the card is maxed out. It's also important to know which part of the card has reached its limit … the core or the memory.

Hercules 3D Prophet II Titanium (default speed : 250/400)

We could clock our GF2 Ti all the way up to GeForce2 Ultra levels with the utmost easy (250/460). Simply slide the memory speed to 460MHz and press apply. That's how easy it is. But of course we were eager to clock it even higher. A couple of BSODs and 3DMark2K1 loops later, I was convinced that the card had reached its limits with a core clock of
285MHz and a memory speed of 485MHz
. That's not too bad at all, but considering the fact that the 3D Prophet II Ti is equipped with 4ns DDR RAM and it has good cooling on the GPU as well as RAM sinks on the memory, I expected it to overclock a little bit better.

Hercules 3D Prophet III Titanium 200 (default speed : 175/400)

Previous reviews of GF3 Ti200 video cards have shown that we can bring a GF3 Ti200 to at least GeForce3 level (200/460). And wouldn't it be nice if we could achieve GF3 Ti500 speeds as well? I was able to overclock my 3D Prophet III Ti200 sample to a completely stable
235MHz core clock and 490MHz memory speed
. That's not Ti500 power, but the cheaper Ti200 is only a tad behind. That's quite a performance. This is the first GF3 Ti200 video card we could clock this high without altering the cooling. Way to go, Hercules! The card didn't even lockup at 245/500 but artifacts started showing up in our 3DMark2k1 loops :(

Want to know how the Hercules video cards handle 3DMark2001 and Quake3 Arena benchmarking? Well then I strongly advise to keep reading …

Page 5 : Benchmarking

Benchmarking

Test System :

- AMD Athlon Tbird 1.4GHz
- EPoX 8KHA+ KT266A Mainboard
- Swiftech MCXC370 Heatsink
- Crucial PC2100 DDR RAM
- Hercules GeForce2 Ti video card
- Hercules GeForce3 Ti200 videocard
- Inno3D GeForce3 Ti200 video card
- Prolink Pixelview GF2 Ti video card
- Inno3D GF2 Ti video card
- Visiontek GeForce3 video card
- IBM 20GB UDMA100 7200rpm hard drive
- Win2k + SP2 + VIA 4in1 4.35
- Deto 21.83

3DMARK2001

Quake 3 Arena v1.17 – Demo001

Quake 3 Arena v1.17 – Torture Demo

I believe the benchmarks are pretty clear. When both Hercules cards run at stock speed, they are just as fast as similar products from other manufacturers. But as soon as we start overclocking, the performance of both cards goes right up to the sky. The GF3 Ti200 even comes very close to Ti500 performance in most tests. Isn't that just great for a $200 video card? That's Ti500 performance at only half the price!

Page 6 : Conclusion

Conclusion

Hercules 3D Prophet II Titanium

Good

- Performs quite well
- Good GPU HSF + RAM sinks
- TV-Out
- Tweakable

Bad

- It's "only" a GeForce2 (no GF3 features)
- You might want to consider a GeForce3 Ti200

Hercules 3D Prophet III Titanium 200

Good

- Excellent performance
- Good GPU HSF + RAM sinks
- Highly tweakable
- Excellent value for money
- TV-Out
- Sexy looks (blue PCB + cooling)

Bad

- Outperformed by the GeForce3 Ti500
- GeForce4 around the corner
- Still too expensive for some

Well, I believe the peeps from Hercules have done it again folks. Both video cards we had in our test lab today performed really great. The 3D Prophet III Ti 200 has amazed us all with its performance and overclocking potential. The 3D Prophet II didn't overclock that bad either. When you combine the power of these two cards with the fact that they come with a sleek blue PCB and a TV-out feature, I see no reason why we shouldn't recommend the Hercules Titanium line-up to every gamer in the world. Personally, I wouldn't buy the GF2 Ti-based video card anymore, because that one is already 2 generations old now. Instead I would invest a few extra $$$ in a GF3 Ti200 video card like the 3D Prophet III Ti 200 and tweak the living daylights out of it. This way you have one of the faster cards available today at the lowest price. But that's just my view on the whole story of course ;) One thing is sure : Not one single overclocker, tweaker, gamer or any other user will be disappointed when he/she buys a Hercules 3D Prophet Ti video card!