The 3D Prophet 9800 Pro

Judging from the 3D Prophet’s board layout, Hercules has decided to base its card on ATI’s capable reference design. There are a few deviations, though, pertaining primarily to the cooling solution. ATI uses a large, aluminum cooler to keep the R350 core stable at 380MHz. Hercules, on the other hand, has included a smaller, copper, orb-style cooler to ensure stability at the same speed. The fan covering the heatsink is translucent and highlighted with a bright blue LED. Operating at 340MHz, ATI doesn’t need to cool the memory chips on the 9800 Pro, yet Hercules has also attached copper ‘sinks on the front and back of the card as well. As with Hercules’ other graphics boards, the 3D Prophet 9800 Pro is laid out on a blue circuit board.

Copper cooling throughout

All of the hottest components are adorned with a heatsink

Standard outputs

The rest of the 3D Prophet 9800 Pro mirrors the hardware that we looked at in our RADEON 9800 Pro Preview. It uses the same R350 VPU, manufactured on a .15-micron process. The 256-bit memory architecture is able to provide up to 21.7GB per second of memory bandwidth. Another feature of the R350 processor is its dual, integrated, 10-bit 400MHz DACs, giving the card support for dual displays. Further, it also includes an integrated 165MHz TMDS transmitter. The result is a single DVI output and a 15-pin VGA output. Using an adapter, the DVI port can be used as a second VGA output.

Overclocking

Among the products in ATI’s DirectX 9-compliant lineup, it almost seems that every card can be overclocked to attain the performance of the model ahead of it. For instance, RADEON 9500 Pro cards are notorious for hitting clock speeds equal to or even greater than those of the RADEON 9700. Same goes for the 9700 overclocked to 9700 Pro levels. But all of those cards require BIOS modifications to even enable overclocking, a measure ATI likely put in place to discourage “performance for free.” With the high-end cards, RADEON 9700 Pro and RADEON 9800 Pro, there are no locked clock speeds.

Hercules 3D Tuner utility for overclocking

So the 3D Prophet 9800 Pro, with its unlocked clock speeds and copper cooling solution, would seem to be an ideal candidate for overclocking. Hercules’ own tweak utility is included with the card, and can increment both the core and memory frequencies 1MHz at a time. Imagine our surprise when it was determined that the fastest stable core frequency was 446MHz (a 15 percent increase) and the most aggressive memory speed was 371MHz (a nine percent increase). You’ll see in the benchmarks that these overclocking results have a profound effect on performance, especially at high resolutions, where we saw increases of up to 13 percent in Unreal Tournament 2003.

The Package

For now, Hercules is anticipating that the 3D Prophet 9800 Pro will sell for roughly $449, however, the next couple of weeks will likely dictate that 128MB 9800 Pro cards will have to sell for less than that. With that aside, Hercules’ 3D Prophet package includes the card with all of its enhancements, a power cable, a DVI adapter, two video output cables (S-Video and composite), and a few CDs. The software includes a full copy of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield, a two-channel version of PowerDVD, and a driver disk.