If looks alone made a product exemplary, the 3D Prophet II GTS would've earned our Extreme Hardware Award immediately. Resting atop the racy, blue PCB are eight Infineon DDR RAM chips, each rated for 6ns. Unlike the GeForce2 boards we've seen previously, though, there is a small blue heatsink seated upon each module (as well as a metallic blue 'sink on the GeForce2 GTS processor). Whether or not these unconventional features will ease our overclocking endeavors has yet to be determined, but we rest assured knowing that if cooling the RAM helps boost the memory frequency, the additional bandwidth gained could be priceless.

In addition, TV-out has been included as a standard feature rather than as an add-on daughter card. Whereas most manufacturers have not included this feature, Hercules gets credit for adding that much more value to the 3D Prophet II.

• Graphics controller: NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS
• RAMDAC/Pixel Cycle: 350MHz
• Memory: 32MB or 64MB DDR RAM
• Bus System: AGP 2x/4x including fast writes and execute mode
• Standards: DPMS, DDC2B, Plug and Play
• Optional Video Module: 1x Video-In and 1x Video-Out
• BIOS: VESA BIOS 3.0 support
• 2D Features: 256 bit 2D acceleration, optimized for 32, 24, 16, 15, and 8 bit color, hardware cursor in true color, multi-buffering
• 3D Features: 256 bit engine with HyperTexel support, optimized Direct3D and OpenGL acceleration, full DirectX 7 support, 32 bit Z/stencil buffer, single pass multi-texturing, anti-aliasing, high quality texture filtering, advanced Per-Pixel texturing, and texture compression.

As we've mentioned before, the GeForce2 is based on the .18-micron process. This move has allowed NVIDIA to ramp up the core frequency to 200MHz without generating the same finger-searing heat the first generation cards radiated. In addition, the card draws less power than its predecessor, and has given us no problem at all on our older Athlon systems.

So why do we feel Hercules' decision to include RAM heatsinks offers so much potential benefit? We firmly believe that if 200MHz memory were readily available when the GeForce2 was released, NVIDIA would not have hesitated to recommend it, despite the price (for a 400MHz SDR equivalent). Unfortunately, this new breed of DDR memory is harder to find than panda bears that will mate in captivity, so it may a while before we see boards sporting higher bandwidth. Until then, our only option is to overclock the memory as high as possible hoping for 32-bit scores that fly through the roof at 1600x1200. Whether it is heatsinks, miniature Peltier coolers, or bags of ice (just kidding), any cooling that the memory receives will be of help. For now, little blue heatsinks will have to do.

You just received a couple of GeForce2-based cards. You've got a couple of "last generation" boards as well. You've got a couple of days off. What do you do? What do you do?! Well, if you're like me, you benchmark until you can't feel the seat of your pants and Pink Dot (watch the movie Swingers) refuses to deliver more food at 3:00 in the morning. Check out the results of our latest benchmarking barrage with NVIDIA's 5.22 drivers. All tests were run with v-sync off. For Quake III testing, texture compression was left at the default setting of "enabled." It should be noted that this setting decreases the visual quality of some lower quality textures, but in exchange, delivers a solid increase in framerates.