Back in September Hercules impressed us all by blowing away the competition in our 3D graphics card Labs (issue 34, p42), and managed to take home the highly coveted PC Authority award for Speed. Only one month later, however, along came the CardEXpert GeForce2 GTS 64Mb,which just managed to pip the Hercules in terms of performance overall. This pattern has been repeated here, as the Hercules 3D Prophet II MX goes head to head with the CardEXpert GeForce2 MX, and unfortunately comes out just a fraction slower.

The Hercules GeForce2 MX uses 32Mb of 183MHz SDR (Single Data Rate) SDRAM rather than the 64Mb of 333MHz DDR SGRAM used in its bigger brother, the GeForce2 GTS. The slower RAM will especially be felt when running 3D applications and games at high resolution, where the Single Data Rate bandwidth will be struggling to feed the necessary data to the speedy GeForce2 core. As a result, the GeForce2 MX is usually a bit faster than the GeForce256 DDR at low resolutions, where the core speed really counts, while being a little bit slower at high resolution, where the memory is being pushed to its limits.

So what does all this means in terms of real performance? Using the Labs testbench, based on an Asus CUSL2, with an i815e chipset, a Pentium III/733MHz CPU and 128Mb of PC133 SDRAM I ran 3DMark2000 Pro for DirectX 7 performance tests, and Quake III for OpenGL tests. On High Quality settings at 1,024 x 768 resolution, the Hercules managed to clock up an impressive 26.1fps, which compares favourably to the 27.5fps of the CardEXpert GeForce2 MX reviewed here. 3DMark2000 Pro also demonstrated the Herculess power, with it delivering a score of 4,843 in 1,024 x 768 at 16-bit colour, although again the CardEXpert GeForce2 MX comes out on top with 5,290.

Like the CardEXpert card, you can also tweak the speeds of the core and RAM on the Hercules card in order to squeeze every possible mote of performance out of it. The default Hercules drivers are only based on the 5.30 nVidia reference drivers, although after installing the latest Detonator 3 and enabling the Coolbits registry entry, we were able to adjust the core and RAM from the Hardware tab in the Display Control Panel. While changing the core frequency resulted in some peculiar behaviour, such as halving the frame rate when it was increased from the default 175MHz to 180MHz, the RAM proved very receptive to adjustment. I managed to get the RAM up to 215MHz without any adverse screen corruption or instability, and at this speed the card managed to post a score of 29.5 in the Quake III benchmark at the above settings, which is an improvement of seven per cent over the default speed.

The Hercules GeForce2 MX also supports the new Digital Vibrance Control, which can brighten up the screen to make images seem more vivid and clear. Gamers will be pleased to see the bundled software, which includes demos of Taychon - The Fringe, Rayman, Thief II, Daikatana and 10Six. While they are not full versions, they should keep you busy for a while.

Given its performance, and even though the CardEXpert GeForce2 MX has an edge when it comes to the benchmarks, the Hercules 3D Prophet II MX still represents excellent value for money. If you are interested in added features like TV output, as seen on the Palit Daytona card of the same cost, or TwinView, such as is found on the CardEXpert GeForce2 MX, then the Hercules might not be the one for you, although if it is just basic performance you need, and your budget is tight, then you would be hard pressed to do any better

Tim Dean and Ian Robson