Hercules 3D Prophet 9700 review -
Watching DVD & Dual Display
Any Radeon has to offer. Within any Radeon chip, the video immersion engine provides integrated iDCT and Motion Compensation together with adaptive de-interlacing for outstanding DVD and video quality.
Watching DVD - All Radeon products provide both hardware motion compensation and iDCT for the highest performance DVD/video playback. With the hardware DVD playback capabilities of the Radeon, the user will receive the high performance and quality while maintaining a low CPU utilization. ATI's Video Immersion technology integrates digital video features, including advanced adaptive de-interlacing algorithms for high video quality.
ATi's DVD/Movie playback simply is awesome. Look at the images below, JPEG compression makes them a tad fuzzy though.
Scene from Spiderman the Movie taken with a Radeon 9700
Dual Display - A new trend that was introduced a lot last year is multiple displays. Much like Matrox and recent NVIDIA products the Radeon 9700 architecture includes technologies that allow dual independent displays. It contains two integrated RAMDAC, support for TV Output, and an integrated TMDS transmitter that allows for support of digital flat panel monitors.
The benefit to the flexible display engine of the Radeon is that it is capable of supporting many different combinations of CRT monitors, digital flat panel monitors, and television displays simultaneously. The graphic card includes the following connectors: 15-pin VGA, 24-pin DVI-I, and s-video. Furthermore, a DVI-I to VGA adapter is included to allow for the connection of a second CRT monitor through the DVI-I connector. I have chosen for a dual-display setup a long time ago. While doing my editorial work for this site I find it extremely convenient to have the ability of an extra screen. It makes my work a lot easier and faster. Dual display gaming is yet another key advantage for the Radeon however not commonly used at all.
In addition to Dual Display the Radeon 9700 comes with HydraVision. This is Multiple Monitor Management Software complements the flexible display engine of the Radeon by providing a flexible and user-friendly interface for multiple monitor environments. HydraVision software has been tested with over 200 applications and is customized to work in intuitive ways for the end-user. For example, you could use a powerpoint presentation in edit mode (left) while the presentation is in slide show mode in full screen on the secondary display (right).
Multiple displays, I love em ;)
Today we will be looking at a new speaker system available from Hercules, in the lab we have the Hercules XPS 2.1 50. This system can be used with PC or Mac for MP3 players, CD Players, TV Set or a Game Console.
Hercules DJ Console review
Most of us can't afford expensive mixing and DJ consoles, turntables, and CD-Players that can handle BPM. But we all do have a fast PC and a crapload of MP3's right ? So all you need is a device that controls the PC and MP3's and that's exactly what the Hercules DJ Console does, basically a mix-console with built in soundcard.
Hercules ProphetView 920 Pro review
Today we are going to review an LCD screen from Hercules, the 17" ProphetView 920 Pro to be precise. It's a 17" screen with a response-time of 20ms.
Hercules 3D Prophet 9500 Pro review
Hercules 3D Prophet 9500 Pro 128Mb DDR videocard review