Drivers

    The drivers provided with the board were Hercules 11.01. Hercules built its own set of drivers that are really based on the NVIDIA reference drivers, in that case the Detonator 11.01 drivers. You can find only a few differences between the two drivers distribution. The only major difference between Hercules and NVIDIA drivers is that the Hercules ones are available in different languages such as French, German, Spanish, etc. when the NVIDIA are only available in English. The drivers are beta and have tons of different bugs. Indeed our Pentium 4 processor was recognized as an AMD K5 Blue (why? Don’t ask me!), and most of the new features brought by these drivers aren’t implemented yet (some buttons don’t work, etc.). And let’s not forget to mention the cosmetic bugs shown everywhere in the display control panel applet. But the worst issue we experienced was the fact performance was dramatically affected by this release so we roll back to the last 7.52 official drivers release from Hercules.

Various Hercules Drivers Shots (click to enlarge)

TV Output

   Frankly we loved this feature since many other nVidia based cards don’t have a TV output. The functioning of the TV Output is really simple: plug the S-Video cable from the card output to your TV and go into the display properties of the driver: you’ll be able to select the TV output and define its settings like PAL or NTSC output as well as the resolution you want the TV to use (640*480 or 800*600). A standard Connexant CX25871 chip codes the TV Output. Note that the Connexant chip manages copyrights so you can’t use it to plug a VCR in order to record the DVD you’re watching. However unlike with a Matrox G400 or G450 you can’t use at the same time the Monitor output or the TV output: it’s the one or the other. The TV-Out plug shows its full efficiency especially when you watch DVDs as you can watch them on your TV instead of your monitor without using any supplementary adapters.

TV Output Settings Panel (click to enlarge)