Hi, my name is Prophet

Pictures

Prophet 3D

The back

GeForce 256 DDR

Rear View

GeForce 256 SDRAM

From the back

The Prophet card itself looks very similar to our reference NVIDIA SDRAM GeForce 256 card except the 3D Prophet has the same Brooktree chip and S-video out that we saw on our NVIDIA DDR reference board.

Vanguard 5.5ns

It appears that our Prophet evaluation board has 5.5ns Vanguard memory which would translate into a memory clock maximum near 183MHz, but the Prophet's default memory setting is only 166MHz. This leaves quite a bit of room for overclocking.

Installation was pretty straight forward. The driver CD that arrived with the Prophet had older GeForce drivers, and we choose to use the newer 3.48 drivers NVIDIA had e-mailed us for our reference GeForce DDR tests. Guillemot did include an overclocking utility with the card, but be warned it only works with the Prophet board. The program refused to run with our reference GeForce SDR and DDR boards.

Overclocking

Our overclocking results were somewhat disappointing. We were only able to get the card up to 130/180 from the default core/memory speed settings of 120/166MHz. At first, we thought the card was stable at 135MHz, but framerate would eventually halve after extended use at 135MHz. We were surprised with the 180Mhz max on the memory -when Vanguard says 5.5ns, they really mean 5.5ns.

We shouldn't really complain about these overclocked numbers (they're pretty respectable), but we've been spoiled by the highly overclockable Voodoo3 and TNT2 cards. We have to remember that any increase in core speed has a larger effect on fill rate because of the GeForce's quad-pixel pipeline.