Conclusion
ConclusionWell although the Radeon 9500 Pro has been 'castrated' with a 128-bit memory bus we still can't ignore the fact that it is performing outstanding. It's often close or faster to the GeForce 4 Ti 4600 yet this one is DirectX9 compatible. For not an extreme amount of money it has everything you want and need for quite a while, stability wise everything was peachy perfect on our test-platform, even VIA's KT400.
You can expect a very high level of performance and an excellent set of features to date, you play all games in 1600x1200x32 without a doubt and you are able to play the games with features like 6X AA and 16x Anisotropic filtering while maintaining very reasonable framerates in 1024x768x32. Everything was 100% stable and the games I tested did not have any issues.
Overall the Radeon 9500 Pro managed to impress me, yet why the **** overclocking has been disabled in this series dissapoints me very much. Of course this was an ATI call, not Hercules. I mean, here we have this specially modified graphics card with Blue ORB active cooler and RAMsinks, this suggests the capability that the card can be overclocked. For all of you who really do want to overclock this graphics card can grab RivaTuner and activate the SoftR9x00 patch which will patch the drivers so they allow overclocking. Downside to this is that the programmer has to release a new patch with every new driver release adn you have to patch is with every new driver. Up-to Catalyst 3.1 is now supported.
Right enough of my rant regarding overclocking. The raw power of the R300 core with it's DirectX9 features will make this an excellent buy in the category mid-range. The recommended retail price of this product is 299 (incl. VAT). In the USA you'll be able to get this or a similar product for roughly 200 USD. Our Guru3D Price watch pages already spotted this product for 160 USD.
Great hardware and software package, awesome product and a reasonable price.
Product: Hercules 3D Prophet 9500 Pro
Manufacturer: Hercules
MSRP: 269
Compare prices: this product for 160 USD
Seek best price for this product.
