Specifications

The List

0.18 micron manufacturing process
175MHz core clock
183MHz memory clock
2 pixels per clock cycle
350 Mpixels/s fill rate
4 texels per clock cycle
700 Mtexels/s fill rate
2.8 GB/s memory bandwidth
20 million triangles/sec
128-bit Single Data Rate (SDR) or 64-bit Double Data Rate (DDR) memory
Digital Vibrance control
NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer (NSR)
High-Definition Video Processor (HDVP)
AGP 4X with Fast Writes
32-bit color
32-bit Z/stencil buffer
Cube environment mapping
DirectX and S3 texture compression
350MHz RAMDAC

Da Front

Da Back

Hyundai 5.5ns SDR

What's in the Box?

Hercules 3D Prophet II MX AGP graphics card
3D Prophet series instruction manual and installation disc

Program disc contains: Driver installation program
HTML format user manual
3Deep color calibration software
Demo versions of: Tachyon, 10Six/Heat.net, Rayman2, Thief II, and Daikatana


NVIDIA NV15 Quake III showcase level

Inspection

The recognizable blue PCB is the first thing that jumps out at you. The construction and design stay close to the reference card roots. Just like its meaner, older brother, the GeForce 2 MX is built on a 0.18-micron process, which reduces the power requirements of the chip. Couple the reduced power with a slightly slower 175MHz core clock speed, and you can see why the MX does not even require a heatsink, let alone a fan to cool it. Hercules apparently thought better of this and added a small heatsink anyway.

The review sample that we have received is very different from the original reference design that we showed you in the GeForce 2 MX Preview, but stays pretty much right in line with the re-designed reference card layout for the production. Comparing the 3D Prophet MX to the NVIDIA PR shots, we can see that only some minor design changes were made to the basic card. The most obvious differences are the missing DVI output and the inclusion of a heatsink on the GeForce II MX GPU core

Our review sample is only equipped with a single VGA output. As such it does not support the new "TwinHead" features. According to the Hercules press release, the dual-display version of the Prophet II MX should be available by the end of July. Single head cards like the one we have should be appearing on store shelves now.