Written
: 5/30/2000When I first lay my eyes on the black and red box containing the Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS, my first thoughts were "Ohhhh, scary looking box." I had first seen the 3D Prophet down at E3 and was really looking forward to testing it out. This card is not like other GeForce2 GTS video card. The 3D Prophet II doesn't follow the reference layout and it has something that no other GeForce2 cards has, heatsinks on the DDR RAM. Seeing that I got the RAM on the Elsa Gladiac to run at 375Mhz, I was really looking forward to seeing how well the heatsinks would compare.
The Hercules 3D Prophet II GTS is one nice looking card. The PCB is done in a cool process blue. The heatsink for the nVidia GTS chip and the RAM sinks are also painted the same color. The card is a little longer than most GeForce2 video cards. As a matter of fact, it's almost of the length of a Voodoo 5 5500.
At first glance the 3D Prophet II GTS seems like a much better deal than the Elsa Gladiac. For the same price, you get a card with better color scheme, heatsinks on the RAM, better core heatsink/fan, and TV out. The software bundle is not too bad. You get a full copy of Power DVD and a few game demos. Unlike the Elsa Gladiac, the 3D Prophet II comes with a full setup manual instead of a single sheet of paper to tell you how to plug it in and turn on the comp.
Hercules has chosen to follow the recommended core and memory speed set out by nVidia. The core runs at 200Mhz and the DDR RAM runs at 333Mhz. However, seeing how Hercules went though all that extra trouble of putting on the nice core heatsink/fan and RAM sink, one would tend to think that this card would be the overclocking king among GeForce2 video cards. Let's find out.
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