Hercules Prophet 9700 Pro

[Cyro]

Ive been waiting on this card for about a month now, Does anyone know whats going on with it. As of now all I can find is that only one company carries it and its about $500. Is this card worth waiting for and is the price going to be lower or should I just buy another brand?

Thanks for the help,
Mike

 

[Rand]

I really don't see much reason to choose it over any other R9700 at the moment.
It's little more then a rebadged reference board just like every other R9700 available at the moment anyway.
So far as I'm aware Tyan is the only manufacturer bothering to deviate from the standard.

Unless of course Hercules attractive fan appeals to you, or their inclusion of Morrowind in the retail box.

I don't recall seeing it available for resale anywhere. It's probably available on hercules/Guillemot's online store though.

 

[Spicedaddy]

They were only available in Europe until very recently... That's why they're hard to find.


I think it has the best cooling, mostly because of the heatsink on the other side of the GPU. And it also looks the best... I wouldn't pay extra for it though.

 

[bunker]

PCGamer has a review of it in the latest issue:

"Hercules adds heatsinks to each memory module on its card, as well as an extra heatsink for the core that attaches to the board's underbelly. While long- and short-term mileage may vary from card to card, we were able to crank out an amazingly fast 372MHz core and 702MHz memory from ours, which equates to a 3DMark2001 SE score of 13,514 on our benchmark system, up from 13097 with default clocks. Furthermore, at that speed, Game 4: Nature jumps from 98 fps to 111 fps. The bad news is that even though the card ran without lock-ups at that speed, we did notice a lot of artifacting. We had to bump the memory back down to 670MHz or so to prevent it, but still managed to retain the lion's share of the performance boost."

According to them it's $29 over msrp of ATI and Crucial cards. I don't think it's worth it in my book. If you can find a standard 9700 for less than msrp, this one's still gonna be $429.

 

[Cyro]

Thanks for all the input guys. Im just going to buy one of the ones you can get now for around $320 and complete my new system. Ive been waiting on buying a majority of the parts till that card came out. Only thing that didnt drop as fast as I hoped it would was the 2600 @ 333 but with all the money im saving now by not getting the Hercules card maybe I can afford to splurge.

Mike