The Dynamite's specs seem to be pretty standard to anyone who's seen a TNT-based product before, and for the most part they are. You won't find any Hercules employed spindoctors working feverishly on fooling the public into believing that the Dynamite TNT offers a "revolutionary" or "massive" step forward compared to other TNT cards. This is because Hercules has always tried to take the high road ethically in the promotion of their products, a practice that Sharky Extreme applauds. (Maybe they could even give a lesson in ethics to old Binky eh?)
All the TNT-based cards available sport some knockout maximum resolutions and color depths, all provided by the onboard 16MB of SDRAM that they come equipped with. The Dynamite TNT includes 16MB of SDRAM as well, and offers resolution support up to the nosebleed height of 1900 x 1200. Even 21" monitors have trouble throwing down numbers like those, so don't feel bad if you're forced to run your Dynamite at a more mundane resolution like 1600 x 1200.
It's funny that 1600 x 1200 can now be considered "mundane" when compared to the new video standards that have appeared this year….Progress kids, progress…
Installing the Dynamite TNT went without issue, which is a much different story than the last time we tested a Hercules product, their Savage3D propelled Beast. The Beast lived up to its name back in September when we couldn't get the card to function in a few of our more popular mainboards. Truth be told, the problems or "issues" with the Beast really fell at S3's feet, and they'll be the first to admit that the Savage3D chip came to market just a wee bit too early. Hercules deserves a pat on the proverbial back for never placing the blame at S3's feet during the first few trying months of the Beast's existence, another sign of the class this operation's personnel conducts day to day business with. (Joe you're the goods baby….)
Getting back to the Dynamite's installation, we found that the board's compact size fit easily into place in three of our test rigs without hesitation. Easy = good. You haven't really lived until you've tried to shoehorn a full size Quantum3D X-24 SLI board into place within a mini-tower setup that has four of its five PCI slots already filled. After experiences like those, we tend to now notice the attractiveness of smaller cards and peripherals in general…
Upon bootup Win95/98 detected the Dynamite properly, and easily installed the drivers from the Hercules provided CD.
Hercules includes a full proprietary driverset with each of their products, referring to the group of programs as the "Hercules Touch". It's nice to see the extra effort here, as while even though the reference nVidia Riva TNT drivers are fully up to the job, the Hercules Touch package offers more detail and adjustments to the multitude of possible settings. Refresh Hz levels, D3D and OpenGL settings, Gamma level selection, and other values are all represented via the various Hercules Touch display properties tabs. The whole app is easily on the level of a similar one from Diamond or even the sharp driver motivated lads at Canopus.
