Today we will take an in depth look at the flagship in the videocard lineup from Hercules. It's the 3D Prophet All-in-Wonder 8500DV. Of course one can notice by  the name that this is an actual Radeon 8500 based videocard with more in and outputs that one can dream of. Combined with awesome 2D and 3D features this should be one hell of a graphics card. But first, the looks and some specs ..

• Powerful 2D and 3D performance boost with a Radeon 8500 GPU attached to 64MB DDR RAM,
• a video editing studio for
  - recording video from an analog and digital camcorder in MPEG2 format.
  - cutting rushes and adding titles with the included video edition suite,
  - recording the edited movies on your VCR.
• A stereo TV tuner supporting all European TV standards (PAL BG/I/DK and Secam L/K),
• DVD playback with hardware acceleration and advanced de-interlacing for crisp and smooth cinema display.

The Hercules All-in-Wonder 8500DV in action

All the All-In-Wonder series have extra multimedia capabilities, we're not talking about the nifty 3D features and performance here, no built-in Stereo TV tuner, MPEG playback that translates itself in DVD, VCD and basically any video format hardware decoding. It does not stop there, because next to decoding there is good support for encoding. The All-In-Wonder series carries a wide range support for video in- and outputs. All this makes it a All-In well .. not a Wonder but definitely good multi-media card.

The Hercules AIW 8500DV as stated is based on that really nice Radeon 8500 chipset and is fabricated in a .15 micron process and the resulting core and memory speeds have been drastically increased from the previous Radeon generation of graphic cards. The graphics board is powered by one of the most competitive graphics processors currently available. It is operating at a core clock speed of 230 MHz (megahertz) which in fact is clocked lower than the normal Radeon 8500 at 275 MHz. Equipped with 64MB of DDR (double data rate) memory this videocard is most certainly looking promising as it is capable to utilize a very decent level of memory bandwidth.