3D
Prophet DDR-DVI GeForce 256
Manufacturer
- Guillemot/Hercules
Thursday, February 17, 2000 - Hilbert Hagedoorn
Hardware used
Pentium II 350 @ 392 MHz 100 MHz FSB
128 Mb PC 100 SDRAM
Software used
Windows 98 SE
DirectX 7.x
Guillemot 3D Prophet drivers v 3.62
General
The 3D Prophet is a 32MB videocard powered by nVIDIA's GeForce GPU
(Graphics Processing Unit), it is equipped with 32 MB 6ns DDR
SGRAM, has a DVI connector
for flat panel displays and LCD projectors. The package is bundled with a manual, S-VHS cable and
a driver CD containing Xing DVD. This card includes TV-Out via a
Brooktree's 869 chip for those looking to watch DVD or game on a
bigger screen than your monitor.
A prelude
 It was August 1999,
after dozens of rumors floating on the web I received a Press-Release
from Hercules, they had ended the rumors by filing for bankruptcy. It
was a tidbit stunning news, since Hercules had always been one of the
leading videocard manufacturers in the Business (remember the dynamite
series?). A lot of people where enjoying their cards and I remember a
very large Hercules community active on the newsgroups. I though it
was such a shame that this company was terminated. Fortunately a huge
player in this industry called Guillemot was interested in taking over
Hercules. Guillemot is well know for their High-End products in the
multi-media peripherals market.
Somewhere in October I
received PR from my contact at Guillemot, they have taken over
Hercules, so their name and products will life on. The first Hercules
product after the bankruptcy is the product that we will review today.
Officially it is the Guillemot 3D Prophet DDR-DVI, but it's now called
the Hercules 3D Prophet DDR-DVI. It is the first, and I hope, one of
many new Hercules products.
Currently it is their
hottest flagship high-performance videocard based up-on the GeForce 256. The
card is (at this time) a very high performance card due to it's Double
Date Rate SGRAM 32MB Frame
buffer, 4x4 integrated Transform and Lighting (Frees up CPU
bandwidth), 256-bit QuadPipe rendering (Fast graphics performance),
AGP 4x with fast write (to makes it even faster). If you'd like to know
more then you should definably continue to read our review
continued on the next pages ...
Coming up: the
videocard review
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