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