The Package - The videocard comes in a nicely designed box accompanied with a multi-lingual small but clear and decent manual. The driver CD contains the basics like DirectX, NVIDIA reference based Hercules drivers, a few game demo's, unfortunately no DVD software. The software package is very basic, nothing special.

Furthermore the box of course contains a videocard. When we look closely at the card we'll notice that it is resembling closely to NVIDIA's reference design. Component usage seemed to be high quality and of course the Hercules signature, a blue PCB.

The Videocard does not come with tv-output or any other nifty option. Just a plain ol' VGA connector is present. When we look at the board more closely we'll notice a twofold of items, no active fan on the heatsink (would have been so nice to see a blue orb on there) and it's memory.

The memory on the videocard is SDRAM based and equipped with nice Hyundai 5.5ns chips. That's should allow us to overclock the videocards memory over 200 MHz.The memory is clocked at the standard 183MHz though. If we do a small calculation that means a memory bandwidth of: (1x128) x 183MHz :8bit = 2928 MB/Sec and that is more then your average selling MX videocard.

The Specs

• 256bit graphics core

• 0.18 micron technology

• 175MHz graphics core working frequency

• 2 rendering pipelines, with 2 texturing blocks each

• 128bit (SDR) memory bus and 64bit (DDR) memory bus supporting 166-300MHz correspondingly

• The supported memory types include: DDR SGRAM and a standard SDR SDRAM/SGRAM

• 8-64MB local graphics memory

• 2.7GB/sec memory bus bandwidth

• Pixel fillrate: 350Mpixels per second

• Texel fillrate: 700Mtexels per second

• 350MHz integrated RAMDAC

• Max display resolution - 2048x1536 at 75Hz

• Integrated Dual-Link TMDS transmitters, which allow connecting two digital displays independently

• External bus interface: full AGP 4x/2x (including Fast Writes).

• Built-in High-Definition Video Processor (HDVP), which allows turning PCs into full-quality DVD players and HDTV receivers/players

• Digital Vibrance Control, which makes all images including 2D, 3D, and video more colorful and vibrant, even on digital flat panels