Best Game Performance to Price Ratio of any Graphics Card. (Updated 7/28/01)
Written: May 08 '01 (Updated Feb 27 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Drop in price makes excellent budget card even better!
Cons: 2D speed good, not great. Hard to upgrade drivers.
The Bottom Line: Reading various benchmark tests, it performs closer percentage-wise to the ultra's then price wise.
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| grimjack2's Full Review: Hercules 3D Prophet II MX |
Card bought: 32 meg, with no TV out or dual monitor capability. The core speed is 175 mhz. Monitor viewed from card is a Viewsonic PS790 with a desktop usually at a resolution of 1152x864.
I bought this card to replace a Matrox G400 that just wasn't cutting it anymore for games that use Transform & Lighting effects. I have a P3-500, and choose my graphic cards based primarily upon its game performance. I kept reading that the MX series of Geforce cards were just as fast as the much more expensive Geforce cards, until you put them in a machine with a 750mhz or higher CPU processor. Only at CPU speeds of higher than that will the processor allow a faster video card to make a difference. The 32 meg version of this card just made a $30 price drop (down from $129) at my local CompUSA, so I thought it was the right time to get one.
The Matrox G400 was very good 18 months ago when I bought it, but now all 1st person shooters tend to use Transform & Lighting and the Matrox doesn't have any of those features built into the card, so the game had to use a software renderer instead. The Matrox uninstalled easy (see my separate review on epinions for that), and the Hercules installed surprisingly easy from the CD. I had no problems at all with the installation onto my Win98 machine, and I've heard horror stories with some cards, so I was very relieved.
The card is somewhat barebones. There is no dual monitor capability, and no TV output. For more money I could have gotten some of these features, but I was trying to keep the price down. The card came with some fairly worthless demos like Daikatana and rayman 2. Ummm, thanks, but I don't think I'll be installing those. I would have rather had a fancy pure Hercules demo that shows off what this card could do, like the Matrox cards come with.
The 2d speed seems good, although not great, and there are no hugely intrusive desktop drivers (like Diamond cards consistently had). The card has a heatsink, and it should remain cool enough, although a fan might have been nice. Also, although I've only noticed a problem playing "Shogun", some people complain on the newsgroups about various games having problems. Some games stop working when upgrading to a newer driver, but then work again with the next driver.
Also, I continually read people saying that it is harder than it should be to upgrade the drivers. It involves a lot of manual deletions of files, and possibly some registry editing. This is unacceptable to me! I haven't upgraded my drivers yet, but I'm not looking forward to this at all.
General specifications:
* 256-bit NVIDIA GeForce2 MX Graphic Processing Unit
* 32MB on-board SDR RAM
* 175MHz core clock
* 2 dual-texturing pipelines (mapping 4 texels per clock)
* 700 megatexels and 350 megapixels per second
* Vision-friendly 32-bit SVGA display performance with a 350MHz RAMDAC
* Extended display resolution up to 2048x1536 at 60Hz in 16 million colors (VGA)
* AGP 2X/4X interface with full AGP texturing support
* Fast Writes for AGP 4X
* Meets all Microsoft PC 98 hardware design requirements
Click here to see my review of the Matrox G400:
http://www.epinions.com/content_21594082948
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 99
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Epinions.com ID:
grimjack2
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 - Top 500 |
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Location: San Rafael, CA, Marin County
Reviews written: 181
Trusted by: 124 members
About Me:
Film is my favorite art form. I live a life of constant amelioration.
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