Blue to keep it cool
Written: Jun 08 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Low Cost; Reliable; Performance; Memory
Cons: Resolution Limitations; Competition
The Bottom Line: This cheap little card has a lot of positive aspects making it one of the best in this arena.
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| MichaelHatton's Full Review: Hercules 3D Prophet II MX |
Introduction
The Hercules Prophet II MX card is one of the cheapest graphics cards made which has a good mix of specification and brand name, making it one of the most valuable. At just under £99 UK the miniature built card is not very expensive, when you consider what it has to offer; AGP, 32Mb, and lots more. Plus if you ever wanted to make a compact PC then this card will appeal, as it is very small.
Specification
It’s an AGP (Advanced Graphics Port) compatible graphics card, it is compatible to accept 4x speeds, which means it can accept data four times faster than real time.
The card, as can be expected with cheap cards, only has one video output, the SVGA HD15 connector every computer has.
Here is a run down of the electrical features:
0.18 micron manufacturing process
175MHz core clock
183MHz memory clock
2 pixels per clock cycle
350 Mpixels/s fill rate
4 texels per clock cycle
700 Mtexels/s fill rate
2.8 GB/s memory bandwidth
20 million triangles/sec
128-bit Single Data Rate (SDR) or 64-bit Double Data Rate (DDR) memory
Digital Vibrance control
NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer (NSR)
High-Definition Video Processor (HDVP)
AGP 4X with Fast Writes
32-bit color
32-bit Z/stencil buffer
Cube environment mapping
DirectX and S3 texture compression
350MHz RAMDAC
The Card
Like other MX cards this PCB is coloured blue, and the design is somewhat basic. They have gone for a simple heat sink rather than equipping it with a fan. Somehow this idea seems to have worked well. Because the card is using 0.18 micron manufacturing the card requires less power, and so doesn’t give off so much heat, as other cards like the GeForce 256 that uses 0.22 micron manufacturing. The core layout is respectively simple, the range of components are laid out well, like the four 8Mb DDR RAM (Double Date Rate) provided by Hyundai giving the 32Mb total RAM. This RAM by the way is more or less to be used with the textures in games or on screen objects; it can also be used as a buffer. It also is especially useful when working with graphics.
Looking at the pixel fill rate, the 350 Million Pixel per second rating is interesting to look at, for instance with the additional rendering of textures and lighting you may expect this to drop to around 175 Million. Compare that to something like the PlayStation 2, obviously a different piece of hardware, but with the rendering it comes at a higher 600 Million.
Included Stuff
The amount of cards in the world that just provide the drivers on floppy discs is quite alarming, thankfully this card doesn’t. What you get is a complete CD-ROM, which includes the drivers and some extra software. The extra software, is mostly things which can adjust the core settings. 3Deep is a software program which lets you adjust the colour and gamma correction. Quick Tweak lies in the System Tray and lets you adjust the Desktop settings.
Installation & Drivers
The card isn’t very large, so it makes it easy to insert, and the card will support either 2x or 4x speeds. It’s always a good idea to adjust the BIOS first, as this can effect its performance most. Installing using the included drivers is quite simple, in that way you can either install them off the CD or let the Operating System like Windows 98, Me, 2000 or XP install them for you, it is also “Plug & Play”. All in all it doesn’t take very long to install.
The drivers which can be update, include a lot of adjustments, and they don’t appear to be made only for this card. You can also make use of a twin display, but this card only has the one VGA output, obviously this is for another MX card. The drivers give you all the settings you could need, but as default the card works fine. You can set things like the Antialiasing, instead of letting the software chose it, and there are lots of sections where you can adjust the desktop colour, and OpenGL settings.
Resolution & Refresh Rate
The card can cope with high resolutions, up to 1600x1200. Below is the list of resolutions it can:
640x480
800x600
940x528 (widescreen)
1024x768
1152x864
1280x960
1280x1024 (1.25:1)
1600x1200
For each resolution it will do 32bit colour. Depending on what sort of monitor you use, you aren’t likely to use the highest settings, on a standard 17” monitor, the peak limit is 1280x1024, with a refresh rate of 60Hz.
On average 70-75Hz is probably the best setting to keep your monitor at, not because you don’t get flickers, but because many monitors give a poorer output of the screen at higher refresh rates. Think about it, when you put the monitor on 100Hz at 1024x768, it will have to work faster to get the screen refreshed at that speed, what you get is a screen which looks slightly blurred. You can try this by simply looking at a low refresh rate and a max refresh rate, the difference is quite clear.
Game Benchmarks
For all of the tests Quake III Arena was used to test the OpenGL performance and the cards frames per second rate. For each test the default settings ranging from Fastest, Fast, Normal and High Quality were used. These were taken at 60Hz. Timedemo was used, to do this simply type
/timedemo 1
/demo demoname
In the console. After the time demo runs look back in the console for the result.
Here are the results:
Setting-----Resolution-----Frames Per Second
Fastest-----640x480-----96.8
Fastest-----800x600-----94.9
Fastest-----1024x768-----82.9
Fastest-----1152x864-----71.4
Fastest-----1280x1024-----57.7
Fast-----640x480-----107.7
Fast-----800x600-----106.6
Fast-----1024x768-----97.4
Fast-----1152x864-----85.4
Fast-----1280x1024-----68.7
Normal-----640x480-----96.5
Normal-----800x600-----93.8
Normal-----1024x768-----81.4
Normal-----1152x864-----68.1
Normal-----1280x1024-----56.6
High Quality-----640x480-----94.5
High Quality-----800x600-----92.4
High Quality-----1024x768-----76.8
High Quality-----1152x864-----65.7
High Quality-----1280x1024-----53.3
At this refresh rate the only setting which would show a drop in speed is High Quality @ 1280x1024 and Normal. This is because at 60Hz you can only get 60 frames per second, even though the game is running faster. What you need to do is get the refresh rate higher, something like 100Hz at 800x600 would be very good looking. I play at 640x480 with 120Hz, and it looks great. Look for RefreshLock on the Internet.
Overall these results conclude the card has good ability, it didn’t struggle too much and most of the game looks great.
The system this was done on:
AMD Athlon 1.1GHz
512Mb SDRAM
Abit KT7 Mboard.
Display
With this game the creation of shapes and mapping of textures is very well done, there never seemed a crack or texture that wasn’t applied well. The aliasing isn’t very high, and with Quake III Arena this was often done to great detail. Most of the time the game looks great, especially the colours and lighting effects. It is compatible with just about every game, the OpenGL drivers can be updated, and the card will work fine with any new Direct X drivers.
Conclusion
The card is very cheap to buy, easy to run, very well made and performs adequately. You can find better in the market, especially at this area, and the competition has been increasing with cheaper cards offering more connections, that make this card seem basic.
This card has good technology, with the great RAM with that speed of 183MHz, and the even performance that doesn’t seem too bad in retrospect of the price.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 140
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MichaelHatton
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