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OK,
if you remember, we were wondering in the
beginning of this piece, if the heat sinks on the
memory of the Prophet II GTS 64 would come into
play in performance and over-clocking. Well,
it is safe to say it did in a fairly significant
way.
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| Overclocking
Benchmarks With The Hercules Prophet
II 64 |
| It's
on the score board baby. |
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The
Abit Siluro GeForce2 GTS 64 was able to hit a
higher core speed of 235 but couldn't match the
420MHz. memory speed of the Prophet II 64.
The Siluro topped out at 405MHz. here. It
also should be noted that the DDR SDRAM chips that
came standard on our Prophet II 64 board, were in
fact the exact same components we found on the Abit
Siluro GF2 64 and Gladiac
64 boards, that being Hyundai part number
HY5DV651622TC-G6. So, it can be easily
deduced that the only variable between the three
boards was in fact the installation of the heat
sinks on the chips themselves with the Prophet
II's design. Thus the reason for the higher
over-clock success with the Prophet II 64's memory
speeds.
So,
the question remains, what do the numbers look
like with the Prophet II at 230/420 and the Siluro
at 235/405? Here is your answer.
Here
we see the Hercules Prophet II GTS 64 lead the
Abit board by a tiny margin in 16 bit color but a
more significant percentage in 32 bit color when
memory bandwidth is more important. On
average, the 32 bit color performance of the
higher speed memory on the Hercules board, was
about 3 frames per second faster.
Why
not drop this bad boy into a 1GHz. setup?
Our sentiments exactly....
Here
we see our Prophet II 64 over-clocked to 230/420
and 1GHz. Pentium III driving the polygons.
1024X768X32 at almost 110 frames per second is
great stuff, without question.
In
our final analysis, we would have to say the
Hercules Prophet II 64 GTS is a real leader in the
rather large pack of GeForce2 cards. It
truly differentiates itself with its complete
feature set including every form of output format
you could want with VGA, TV and DVI
connections. Furthermore, the quality design
of the board with its "extra mile"
cooling / heat sinking construction, really shined
in our battery of unforgiving tests.
The
final factor to consider is price. You can
find the Prophet II GTS retailing for around
$375-$399 while OEM or "white box"
versions can be found on line for as low as
$320. This may still seem a little pricey
for a graphics card for some folks. However,
competitive products like the Elsa Gladiac are
also in this range and don't offer the kind of
feature set and cooling solution that the Prophet
II 64 brings to the table. We like the
Prophet II GTS 64 so much, we're giving it THE
award.
and
the Heat Meter says...
Get
into the Hot Hardware Conference Room and Get
Stoked!
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