A Closer Look

The Prophet 9700 Pro comes with the now common selection of connectors, that's an analogue connector, DVI connector and TV out.

There's little doubt that this card's a looker. The blue PCB and copper/gold coloured fans and RAM sinks work well and although it's all about personal taste I prefer it to the red of the reference card design.

Click For Larger Image

Click For Larger Image

What I remain wary about though is the Orb style cooler. In testing under various conditions here at 3DV we've yet to find a situation where this type of cooling solution offers any benefits over a regular solution, in fact depending on the design it's often less efficient because there just isn't the surface area required to dissipate heat efficiently.

Hercules' choice of HSF unfortunately does little to change my views about this style of cooler, it's big on looks but fairly standard on cooling performance. The fan and upper ring of the cooler are actually plastic, coated in a copper coloured paint, and although the rest of the cooler may well be copper as claimed there just isn't enough surface area to do anything out of the ordinary with regards keeping the GPU cool.

I'm not sure who'd had this card before us but the fan retention was in a bad way when it arrived. Both plastic retainers were barely clinging on and when I removed the fan to see if any thermal grease had been used I was faced with a GPU that was almost completely smeared with Arctic Silver and I don't mean just on the core either!

Below is the rear of the card showing one of the two retaining clips, in fact this one was the better of the two! The side of the clip was compressed and had been worn away making it impossible to get it to grip properly. Also, because the Hercules relies on spring pressure from a strip of steel to hold it in place rather than using actual springs, it seems to apply a lot of pressure to the plastic retaining clips which have suffered as a result. I should point out that in the vast majority of cases you're not going to be removing the fan after purchase so it's perhaps a problem that only crops up on review samples but by the same rule it does highlight a bit of a design weakness.

As is becoming a common feature on Hercules' graphics cards the Prophet 9700Pro comes with a full compliment of copper coloured aluminium RAM sinks.

And beneath those sinks as expected we find Samsung's 2.4v, 144 ball BGA memory. Rated at a maximum of 350MHz and 3.3ns this is in common use on a variety of 9700 Pro boards.

Hercules have also decided to add an additional heat sink the the rear of the card directly behind the GPU.

The Bundle

I'm always pleased to see the inclusion of DVD software and Hercules have sweetened the deal further with the inclusion of the excellent Morrowind. The software aside you also get a DVI to analogue dongle and video out cable.

	MORROWIND: THE ELDER SCROLLS III Full version of the award winning game. The third episode of the famous RPG “The Elder Scrolls” immerses gamers in a fantastic medieval world with a bewitching heroic-fantasy atmosphere and first-person viewing. Its cutting-edge graphics set it way above any other RPG game: hyper-realistic textures, real-time shadows, skeletal based animation…
	POWERDVD™ 4.0 XP PowerDVD™ 4.0XP enables viewing of top quality video and media-rich DVDs on PC. It offers excellent sound and image quality, thanks to its MPEG-2 video and Dolby Digital™ audio decoding capabilities.
	3DEEP® Color setting utility. 3Deep® from E-color™ automatically adjusts the images PC gamers see on-screen, enhancing color, lighting and shading in darker game levels.