Hercules 3D Prophet II GeForce2 MX

The Prophet II MX is very similar to the NVIDIA reference design. The PCB is very similar to the reference card in shape and size but has a blue PCB instead of the usual green. The Heatsink also comes in blue, to blend-in with the rest of the board.The memory speed of the Hercules is clocked at 183Mhz, which is a jump from NVIDIA’s 166MHz reference board, so that memory bandwidth is increased from 2.7GB/s to about 2.9GB/s. The board comes with 32MB’s of Hyundai memory (I used to drive a Hyundai a while back!), which is rated at 5.5ns. (6 ns on the reference board). Hercules has used the faster memory to support the higher clock speeds of their board. One important note to make on the Prophet is that it does not support the TwinView technology of the GF2 MX. ( TwinView is very similar to Matrox’s DualHead ,which gives two independent displays from one card.). So essentially the 3D Prophet II MX is more of a 3D card meant solely for gamers rather than for a business PC,and incorporates all the main 3D features of the GF2 MX and comes a bit cheaper than other GF2 MX cards.

The Pack:

The complete box comes with the card, a 48-page manual (in several languages), and the driver CD. The drivers are not very different to the NVIDIA reference drivers and just has a Hercules feel towards it. The driver CD also has a few 3D games but didn’t impress me much.

The Test

We tested the card on two systems, a low end Celeron 600 and a mid range P III 700. The benchmarks will show what to expect from this card. So go on reading!