The Card Itself

In our preview of the pre-production model of this card, we established this card as the card to beat among the various TNT2 Ultra cards. Its main differentiation from the rest of the pack is its highly clocked core and memory speeds. Moreover, it seems to be easily overclockable over the 175/200 default that it comes at. Let's look at some of the other features it has.

Keeping it cool

As many of the TNT2 Ultra cards are doing, Hercules' Dynamite Ultra is coming equipped with a nice little heatsink and fan mounted on top of the graphics chip itself. Our past experience with this card is that it doesn't get too hot, and certainly not nearly as hot as its older brother, the TNT, but an integrated heatsink and fan are always welcome. The particular fan on the Hercules card is made by Aavid, a well-known name in the cooling business. The heatsink and fan are very similar to a design Aavid has had for a while now:

   

The Dynamite Ultra that we received is the version that comes with a TV-out. Looking on the card, we see that the TV-out is controlled by the Brooktree 868 TV-out chip, which is a very popular and common TV-out controller.

The Hercumeter!

Probably the most famous of the Hercules features is their built in overclocking utility, dubbed the Hercumeter. They used this meter before on their previous cards and received a fair share of applause for it. Along with a big suite of utilities for fine-tuning the video options of the video card, the Hercumeter allows for easy overclocking by allowing the user to adjust the core and memory clock speeds by simply sliding the respective slider to the desired speeds. The core clock is adjustable anywhere from 150 to 200MHz, and the memory clock allows adjustment from 150 to 250MHz.

Of the other utilities that Hercules adds in, there are a few notable ones. Besides the basic utility for adjusting the gamma and color settings, there are tools for specifically altering OpenGL and Direct 3D settings. There is also a utility called the "Monitune" which allows the refresh rate of the monitor to be adjusted.

DVD action

If you spend $249, you get the TV-out and the software DVD player, too. The software DVD player that Hercules is using is a good one- WinDVD. This is the only software player that currently supports the TNT2's hardware subpicture blending for higher DVD quality such as subtitles and menus. If you plan to watch a lot of DVD's and want a good software player, the Hercules card is a good choice for this feature.