Manufactor: Hercules - Guillemot
Price: $460

Introduction

Hercules is one of the best manufactors of videocards. They were known for their very fast and highly overclockable cards when the TNT2 was the fastest thing around. Unfortunately, Hercules kept losing money and had to close down their factory right before the launch of the Geforce DDR. That was a huge loss to us overclockers, because most of the other manufactors used parts that were nearly as overclockable as Hercule's parts. Lucky for us, Guillemot, better known for their Maxi products such as the Maxi Fortissmo Sound card, has bought Hercules and saved it from the graveyard. Recently, Guillemot's video branch which now uses the name Hercules, has returned to the hardware scene and brings us the Hercules Geforce GTS; both in 32MB and 64MB DDR versions. Overclockers Online is bringing you a review of their most powerful product, namely the Hercules 3D Prophet II 64MB.

Specifications

Hercules (or should I say Guillemot?) has chosen to equip their flagship card with some nifty features, including 5.5ns DDR memory, AGP 4x support, DVI out (to connect LCD monitors), TV-out (so you can play your favorite game on your 40" big screen television) and lots of other goodies. The card is manufactored on a shiny blue plc which makes this baby look really really good! Of course, they added a blue heatsink & fan onto the GPU for active cooling(what did you expect from Hercules?), and last but not least blue memory heatsinks were placed on the RAM to cool down that 64MB of Double Date Rate power.

Below is a detailed list of all features of the 3D Prophet II 64MB:


The most anticipated high-velocity GPU combined with Hercules hardware design innovation

Incorporates the latest Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) performance leader from NVIDIA�, the GeForce2 Pro, optimized for DDR
Hercules runs its 3D boards at the fastest achievable speed. With specially adapted RAM heatsinks, Hercules gives 3D Prophet II GTS Pro stability at higher clock rates.

Outrageous speed

Ultra-fast 64MB DDR memory offers turbo-boosted 3D performance in games requiring large texture buffers
4 dual-texturing pipelines, mapping 8 texels per clock cycle to generate 1.6 GigaTexels per second and 25 million triangles per second for mind-blowing frame rates
200MHz core clock, DDR RAM operating at 400MHz, delivering a 6.4GB memory bandwidth
4X AGP with Fast Writes/AGP 2X compatible

Cinematic realism in multi-textured 3D games

* Incorporates the NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer (NSR): delivering complex per-pixel shading for greater detail and boosted visuals
* Hardware Transform and Lighting Engines
* Hardware Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA)
* Most advanced supports for OpenGL� (Silicon Graphics) and DirectX�7 (Microsoft�) such as cube environment mapping, vertex blending and projective textures. Texture Compression support on D3D and OpenGL�

High quality TV/video output to TV and DVD-video acceleration

* TV/Video Output for playback of DVD titles or games on your television: NTSC and PAL TV output in 640x480and 800x600
* Play DVD-Video on your PC with PowerDVD� and the 3D Prophet II GTS Pro motion compensation hardware engine

Boosted pc's 2D performance

* Outstanding resolutions up to 2048x1536 in 16 million colors performed with a 350MHz RAMDAC


As you can see, Hercules announced the core to be clocked at 200MHz, while my card features a default core speed of 220MHz. The DDR-RAM however, is clocked at the anticipated 183mhz (365MHz DDR). Recently, Hercules released a Geforce GTS Pro and Geforce GTS Ultra. The difference between these cards lie in their respective core and memory speeds. On the "old" card that I have reviewed, the core is running at 220MHz and the memory at 365MHz. The Pro version features a core of 200MHz and 400MHz DDR-RAM. Last but not least, the Ultra version has a core of 250MHz and a memory clock of 460MHz! The software bundle Hercules sent along contains a full working version of Power DVD, Aliens vs Predator and Rollcage. Not too bad if you ask me :).

The test

System Setup

* MSI 694D with 3.01B bios
* 2x Intel PIII700E @ 903MHz with two Alpha PAL35 coolers and Artic Silver
* Hercules Geforce GTS 64MB
* IBM 34.5GB harddrive
* Creative Soundblaster Live! Platinum
* Windows 2000 Pro

Overclocking

My board was able to sustain a core clock of 245MHz instead of the 220MHz default speed. The memory ran just fine at 410MHz instead of the default 365MHz. This means my card outperforms a Geforce GTS Pro and is likely only a few frames behind on the Ultra version (which does cost a LOT more than the one we tested). Powerstrip 2.75.01 was used to overclock the card.

Thanks to for some of the pics! These guys are great ... so go visit them today!

Testing and torturing ...

To see what this beauty can pull off, I decided I would run Quake3: Arena demo's because this game uses the T&L hardware support and because it is one of the most beautiful games available for PC today. We will not be using SMP support because the game would not run. What I did find out was that I can play the game reasonably well at a resolution of 1600x1200, all settings maxed out with a color depth of 32-bit FSAA 4x4 enabled! Normally this might cause your system choke, but I think while the second cpu is calculating all of the FSAA calculations, the other takes care of the rest. For benchmarking purposes I disabled the FSAA, though it didn't ever make Q3 slow down in any level, no matter how many bots I used. Please note that we used the latest patch (1.25) to test.

Next, we will also test the card with one of the most used benchmark suites around: MadOnion's 3D Mark 2000 v1.1. This suite will test your videocard on almost all supported features and will give you a good idea of how fast your board is.

Below, you can take a look at the numbers we took from both 3D Mark 2000 and from Quake3: Arena (demo001.dm3)

As you can see the card is pretty able to run speedily at high resolutions, for which we have to thank the 64MB of RAM this board has. The numbers for 3D Mark are on the low side, but I think that might be because of the 6.34 Nvidia drivers I used, or because of the DirectX 8 version 1.83 I used. If someone might have a clue why this happened, please post your idea or suggestion on the forum.

Conclusion

The Hercules Geforce GTS 64MB is one damn fast videocard and outperforms every single videocard out there, except for the Pro and Ultra versions of the GTS chipset. The board is made for the hardcore gamer and is not intended for an occasional gamer or someone who only uses his computer to surf the web and play solitaire once in a while :). Those who have monitors up to 17" might better buy a GTS with 32MB DDR-RAM because the extra 32MB are only used with resolution of 1280x1024 and greater. With the money you spare, you could buy more RAM for your computer, or something else you want.

Good
* Very fast
* Lots of features
* Active cooler + heatsinks on memory
* Highly overclockable!

Bad
* Price :(
* Software bundle a bit "old"
* Pro version and Ultra version are released ...