Manufacturer
- Guillemot
Monday, May 22, 2000 - Hilbert Hagedoorn
Hardware used
Pentium III
Coppermine 500E @ 667 MHz, i820 133Mhz FSB
Pentium II 350 @ 392 MHz 100 MHz FSB,
128 MB PC 133 SDRAM
Software used
Windows 98 SE
DirectX 7.x
Detonator Drivers 5.16
A prelude
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 unexpected news, since Hercules had always been one of the leading
videocard manufacturers in the Business. 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 multimedia peripherals market.
The reputation lives on ...
Somewhere in October I received a PR from my contact at Guillemot, they have taken over Hercules, so their name and products will life on. The first Hercules
product after it's bankruptcy was the Hercules 3D Prophet DDR-DVI. Now it's
time for their second product, a product based around the hot and new
NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS Graphics Processing Unit, the Hercules 3D Prophet
II GTS
While looking at the the Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS (picture below)
you'll notice several particularities, (1) the design is diverting
from NVIDIA's reference design GeForce2, (2) all memory modules are
covered with a heatsink, (3) that's a cool looking blue PCB.
The Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS is equipped
with 32 MB 6ns DDR SGRAM and comes with a S-VHS Output for gaming on
the Big screen. In the box you'll find one Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS,
a S-VHS to composite cable (for TV's), A well written and detailed
manual, Driver CD including a full version of PowerDVD and finally a
detailed manual for PowerDVD. The Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS is
now actually equipped with a HDTV processor, a new standard that is
introduced in the US at this time. The HDTV processor can be connected
to a HDTV decoder. Now we should be able to watch Full-screen HD
television. Unfortunately in Europe this new standard is not
introduced yet, so it will not play a big role on this side off the
world.
Coming up: the
videocard review continued
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