The Hercules 3D Prophet II Ultra
So Cool...it's blue...

By, Marco "BigWop" Chiappetta
January 4, 2001

The Card itself...
Ooooh! It's Blue!

Whenever we get a new product here in the labs, we like to physically scrutinize it and see if the manufacturer took any steps to "personalize" their product.  We also check to see if it's physical quality is up to par with other products in it's class.

The most obvious thing you'll first notice is the blue PCB of the 3D Prophet II Ultra.  This doesn't make any difference in terms of overall performance but it is cool to see something different now and then. :)  If you look at the 3D Prophet II Ultra side by side with another "Ultra" (the Elsa Gladiac to be exact), you'll also see Hercules made a few other subtle changes.

Even though their usefulness is debatable, nVidia's reference design calls for heatsinks to be mounted on the RAM.  If you take a look at these pictures...

                    

You'll see that the heatsinks on the 3D Prophet II Ultra are a little wider but much thinner than the ones mounted on the Gladiac.  This isn't that big of a deal but we preferred the larger, taller-finned heatsinks that ship on the Gladiac.

That's not where the differences end though.  The heatsink / fan combo used to cool the GPU itself is quite different than the one mounted on the Elsa card also.  

                    

This time around, we prefer the 3D Prophet II Ultra's solution.  Although the cooler mounted on the Prophet is physically smaller, there is much more surface area and there are many more blades on the fan.  The increased airflow generated by the extra fan blades blowing across the extra fins on the heatsink should result in lower operating temperatures on the 3D Prophet II Ultra.  We say "should" because we didn't have any proper thermal sensors to compare temperatures between the two cards.

A good heatsink only works well if its making good contact with the chip it's supposed to be cooling.  A key component to the efficiency of the cooler is the thermal interface material used.  We removed the stock cooler to see what Hercules opted to use on the 3D Prophet II Ultra...

                   

It was nice to not find thermal epoxy used but we were not impressed with the thermal pad we found.  Some thermal pads actually work well (the type Tenmaxx uses comes to mind) but the type used on the 3D Prophet II Ultra was very brittle and wasn't making good contact with the Ultra chip at all.  I got the lighting set up perfectly for the pic on the right.  If you take a look at it you'll see the marks on the chip where the thermal pad was making contact.  Notice that only a small percentage of the chip was ever in contact with the cooler and the center, the hottest spot, was never touching.  This was a but of a disappointment but we cleaned it up, applied some Artic Silver Thermal compound and pressed on.

Overclocking and Gaming Performance