Technical Support

   One good point goes to Hercules for its top-notch technical support. The card is under warranty for 3 years and you can reach the technical support by phone or email. But another good point goes to Hercules, unlike Creative, Hercules provides their customers with latest Bios updates. Best of all the bios updates are really easy to install since a setup wizard under Windows will guide users. Concerning drivers, Hercules releases the latest drivers based on the NVIDIA reference driver frequently so you’re not forced to use the leaked NVIDIA beta drivers to fix a problem you have.

3D Tweaker

   Hercules provides a small applet named 3D Tweaker 2.4 with the 3D Prophet III Titanium 500 card. This utility is intended to be used only by power users and let them define the advanced settings of the card. They can change the Hardware core clock speed up to 260MHz as well as the RAM clock up to 575Mhz. Sure by overclocking the board in such an intensive way you can expect freezing, and other problems when you use your computer. The best rule of overclocking is to overclock frequencies in a reasonable way that doesn’t exceed 15% of the initial frequency. When you launch the 3D Tweaker its icon appears in the tray area of Windows so you can access it easily. The tool also lets you change the different FSAA settings (like the anti-aliasing method from 2 to 9). A nice feature of the 3D Tweaker is the test button that will test the new frequencies you have set by applying instantly: if your system becomes unreliable you’ll simply have to reboot it and the previous settings will be restored.

Hercules 3D Tweaker (click to enlarge)

OverClocking

   We were able to push our card up to 255 MHz core, and 570 MHz memory with complete stability due to the memory heatsinks that are really efficient. Notice we would certainly be able to push the core clock higher if we would have more powerful cooling systems inside the computer’s box. Note that overclocking isn’t really advised by any 3D card manufacturer as it may cause damages to the card if you overclock incorrectly.