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Hercules 3D Prophet 9800 Pro Review - Hardware

ATi has continued their Radeon 9700 Pro success based on R300 core by releasing the newly improved architecture codenamed R350. R350 is not entirely a new architecture; instead it has derivatives from R300 and sports new enhancements like SMARTSHADER 2.1, SMOOTHVISION 2.1 and HYPER Z III+. Radeon 9800 Pro is clocked substantially higher at 380Mhz core and 340Mhz memory and ATi continues their onslaught at NVIDIA with it's highly touted 8 pixel pipelines. Radeon 9800 Pro has an effective 680Mhz memory clock speed on 256-bit DDR-I memory interface which gives a whopping 21.8GB/s of memory bandwidth.

Hercules 3DProphet Radeon 9800 Pro comes with a nice designed box with a Dracula image showing the power of the R350 VPU with Anti-Aliasing, Pixel Shading and Tran lucidity effects. All along, Hercules has been targeting their cards on gamers and hardware enthusiasts therefore much effort have been put into developing better cooling concept and outlook that will attract this group of consumers. In this article, we will check out the baseline Direct3D and OpenGL gaming performance with no AA/AF and 4xAA/8xAF for different group of gamers. Most importantly, we will check out how well this card will overclock before drawing a final conclusion on this card.

Specifications:

Hercules 9800 Pro Specs .

Cinematic Rendering

• Up to 256MB of DDR memory provides increased performance when rendering high resolution textures, characters, and environments
• 256-bit memory interface delivers the bandwidth for real-time 3D graphics and barrier-free performance
• 8-pixel pipeline architecture doubles the rendering power of other graphics processors

Maximum 3D

• SMARTSHADER™ 2.1 supports the latest Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 feature set, enabling cinematic quality lighting and shadow effects.
• SMOOTHVISION™ 2.1 delivers the sharpest, clearest textures without sacrificing frame rates.
• 128-bit full floating point precision enables billions of color variations to render the same lighting and effects as Hollywood studios.
• Featuring CATALYST™, the industry's most stable 3D acceleration software.

Generation Now Technology

• Supports the latest Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0 and OpenGL® feature sets, ensuring long-term compatibility with the hottest gaming releases.
• FULLSTREAM™ removes blocky artifacts from streaming Internet video to deliver smoother looking, higher quality online content.
• VIDEOSHADER™ integrates features to provide unprecedented support for digital and high definition video.

Package Content

Hercules 9800 Pro Box

• Hercules 3DProphet Radeon 9800 Pro Card
• User Manual
• Installation CD-ROM
• DVI-I to VGA converter
• PowerDVD
• Raven Shield Rainbow Six 3 Full Game
• S-VHS Cable
• Standard composite video cable
• S-VHS/Composite converter cable

Hercules 3DProphet Radeon 9800 Pro card looks real cool with it's blue PCB and copper heatsinks. The components layout is identical to the ATi original Radeon 9800 Pro card that we have tested but the color of the PCB is blue now instead of red. it's PCB is still based on 8 layers design and is slightly longer than the Radeon 9700 Pro card. The copper ramsinks found on this card look better than ever where there is a copper bridge to join between the 2 (continued next page)