| |
Date: | October
5th, 2002 | | Type: | Review |
| Supplier: | Guillemot
| | Author: | Mayhem |
| RRP: | $389
AUS | DVI
and TV-Out:
With most cards coming with quality TV Out these days there
is not much to talk about there, but DVI on the other hand is a rather handy feature
to have, especially with new games coming out with multiple monitor support. 
By
running two monitors you have a couple of choices, you can duplicate your desktop
(sometimes this may be useful) but the most popular is the stretching of your
desktop across the two monitors. By stretching the desktop you will notice the
main benefit in graphics applications or design applications where you need a
large work area, another great reason for doing this is that you can have programs
running (e.g. ICQ, IRC, COOLMON, WINAMP etc) and viewable while your playing games,
this allows you to keep an eye on system performance etc.
Overclockability:
Since the card comes with ramsinks you think it will
be have decent overclockability, well this is definitely the case. We managed
to easily get the card to run flawlessly with both memory and core running at
300MHz (others have got even higher, 325/310, which is a rather impressive increase). By
overclocking the system roughly 10% we manage to squeeze out and average of 200
3DMarks from the card, this means with a slight CPU and slight video card overclock
you can get upto 500 extra 3DMarks out of a similar spec system, that is rather
decent for a budget based graphics card and small hardware overclock that can
be done in a matter of minutes.
Results:
With the superior
vertex and pixel shading capabilities of the Radeon chips, the Radeon 9000 Pro
can easily outperform the GeForce 4 MX in DirectX 8 applications. The newly implemented
features and full DirectX 8.1 support make the 9000 Pro a great card for todays
gaming market. The
only disappointment from this card is the fact it was out performed by a Radeon
8500LE which makes you think what has been done to make this happen. In reality
the performance drop isn't substantial, but its by the same margin the 9000 Pro
is ahead of the GeForce 4 MX. Conclusion:
Well overall the 3D Prophet 9000 Pro performs rather well, as you would expect
from an ATi based graphics card, nVidia sure do have some competition on their
hands, which is good to see as this should mean overall price drops and better
cards coming out in the future (just look at the Radeon 9700 Pro based ATi card
and the soon to be released NV30 based nVidia cards). Surprisingly
enough the Hercules 3D Prophet 900 Pro is the only Radeon 9000 based card on the
market to have the option for 128MB memory. Pros:
- Memory cooling with ramsinks
- DVI
and TV out
-
Hercules Blue PCB
- Overclockability
- Doesn't
require additional power
Cons:
With
this card due for release in the next few months it should be something to look
out for. The 128MB is at $429, and the 64MB which has not yet been released yet
should be at $389. We
would like to say thankyou to Jean-Francois Galle from Guillemot Australian for
supplying us with this 3D Prophet 9000 Pro. To find out more information on the
range of products that Hercules have then please visit their website, au.hercules.com.
Score:
9 / 10
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