Manufacturer: Hercules Tech: AGP based nVidia RIVA TNT w/ 16Mb Price: $150 - $160 (ESP)

Regular readers of Sharky Extreme have watched the trials and tribulations that video accelerator manufacturer Hercules has gone through for most of 1998.

From a late product introduction on the Voodoo2, to a disastrous debut of the market's first Savage3D-based card (a product that's required two BIOS patches along with a slew of driver updates to finally get ship shape) the year hasn't been filled with many highpoints for the beleaguered Hercules. Add to this the recently public acknowledgement that the merger/bailout by the European-based video card manufacturer known as Elsa has fallen through, and you can see how happy most Hercules employees will be when the big apple falls in Times Square signaling the end of 1998….

As gloomy as the year seemed to be for Hercules, we've got good news for longtime fans of the company and gamers looking for a great product alike: The Dynamite TNT card we're reviewing today is one of the best TNT-based video cards on the market. No joke here folks, that isn't a typo…

Thanks to the Riva TNT's yield level finally moving to better levels, and the addition of a cooling fan/heatsink to the chip by Hercules, the Dynamite TNT is the most stable card we've tested of all the various TNT cards we've put through the ringer this year. It doesn't matter if it's running at it's stock 90MHz core speed, or even if it's overclocked (using Powerstrip) to 115MHz, the Dynamite TNT allows for hours of worry-free power, even in a small case where airflow isn't the greatest.