3D Prophet FDX 8500LE

The front

The back

In typical Hercules fashion, the 3D Prophet FDX 8500LE sports a blue printed circuit board. We’re not sure if it helps sell graphics cards, but in a sea of so many green boards, it’s refreshing to see someone doing something a bit different. Also following tradition, the 3D Prophet FDX 8500LE utilizes an Orb heatsink/fan combo for cooling the RADEON 8500LE chip.

Orb-style cooling fan

Hynix 4ns memory

As we mentioned previously, our 3D Prophet FDX 8500LE was equipped with 64MB of four nanosecond RAM from Hynix Semiconductor. This limits the overclocking potential of the board, but keeps costs low.

In addition to the traditional VGA output, the RADEON 8500LE also has DVI and video connectors.

Video input/output, VGA and DVI connectors

Pretty blue PCB!

Overclocking

We were curious to see how well our 3D Prophet FDX 8500LE card would overclock, so we grabbed a copy of EnTech Taiwan’s Powerstrip utility and began adjusting the clock frequencies for the graphics core and memory.

On the memory side of things, we were limited to 255MHz before visual anomalies began to creep up on the display. Hynix must have stayed very close to their 4ns rating with our memory chips.

The core itself was much more willing to overclock however. We were able to clock our 8500LE chip to 306MHz before we noticed tearing in games and benchmarks. That’s a substantial improvement over the 8500LE, and even the RADEON 8500 itself!