Review: Hercules 3D Prophet 3 (Page 1/7)

Posted: July 18th, 2001
Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen

Introduction

Hercules is a company that’s in a very unique position. Not only is it one of the most recognizable manufacturers of GeForce3 based cards; it has become the most recognizable company to produce Kyro2 based cards. This could leave Hercules in a potentially dangerous position with NVIDIA, but I doubt that NVIDIA will take any action like terminating chip supply to Hercules. Because it’s such a well known and respected NVIDIA partner, Hercules has a strong position of holding onto NVIDIA’s hands even if NVIDIA felt like it didn’t like the relationship anymore. Once long ago, a company named 3dfx disconnected with many of its primary partners like Diamond Multimedia and Creative Labs only to be chained down by the responsibilities of making the graphics chip, making the graphics board and marketing the graphics board.

Of course, who could blame 3dfx for trying to strategize like ATI and Matrox? Their business model was tried and true, making ATI and Matrox the two largest graphics companies in the world. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of resources and experience to do what ATI and Matrox does and 3dfx apparently didn’t have quite what it takes. Because of this, Hercules and others will continue to remain an integral part of NVIDIA’s strategies for a long time to come.

Today I’m going to be looking at Hercules’ rendition of a GeForce3 card -- the 3D Prophet 3. Because there have been a number of other GeForce3 cards from other manufacturers released before it, the 3D Prophet 3 must be able to offer something to the end user if it wants to make it on their purchase list. This could be any number of things from the following:

Extremely generous and up to date game bundle,
Excellent overclocking potential,
Hardware features not found on other GeForce3 cards,
Retail price that’s well below that of other competing cards,
Frequent drive updates,
Superior technical support via telephone and e-mail

Hercules has a tradition of offering frequent driver updates and pretty good technical support. Besides this, it seems to always have really high quality boards and always go a little further than others when optimizing its cards. If you’re into cosmetics, Hercules cards tend to have a better fashion sense than other cards as well. Although whether being blue makes it faster or not is still debatable.

But today, we’ll closely examine the Prophet 3 and see what it has and doesn’t have to offer. In terms of features, we’ll be looking at its physical features and software features as well. I don’t expect an extravagant software bundle since Hercules seems to ship pretty much the same software set. Let’s take a look.

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