Hercules has a reputation of building high-quality and foremost nicely designed graphics cards. Their product release strategy for graphics cards is aggressive as they make smart intelligent decisions based on what the market demand is. They are not afraid of releasing a product that is just a little different compared to the competition. So every now and then, they bring a product to the market that makes me frown and wonder if it'll be a hit.

Allow me to explain, an ongoing trend lately is that we see more, much more memory utilized on graphics cards. Especially the high-end segment seems to need that extra chunk of memory to be as efficient as the card needs to be. This is basically what we'll take a look at today. A product with an amazing amount of 256 MB memory. But wait .. the most interesting thing is that it is a Radeon 9600 based card, and not even the Pro model. So here we have this product that balances in the upper region of the low-end segment and the lower segment if the mid-range performing product yet equipped with an amount of memory that we only see in very specific high-end graphics cards.

Today we are going to see if the 256 MB of memory is justified for this particular product, the product reviewed is the 3D Prophet 9600 with 256 MB DDR memory. The main difference between the normal 9600 and the Pro version is as always based on differences in core and memory frequencies in the non-pro case we see a 325 MHz graphics core frequency and a (2x)200 MHz Memory frequency and a 4 pixel pipeline architecture.

Interested ? Let's continue then.