The basic features of the card are what you would have come to expect from any GeForce3. Following NVIDIA's reference design fairly closely, Hercules ships the 3D Prophet III with the GPU clocked at 200MHz and stocked with 3.8ns DDR-SDRAM that comes clocked at 230MHz, offering an effective speed of 460MHz. The board also has a 350MHz RAMDAC speed, as do other GeForce3 video cards. But enough about what's the same... what's different?

Hercules fit their 3D Prophet III GeForce3 video card with blue memory heatsinks and an HSF that looks cooler than it apparently makes the card. While Hercules' HSF looks a lot like the Blue Orb that we saw on the OCZ Titan 3 we recently reviewed, the Prophet III wouldn't overclock nearly as well as that card did. But we were certainly able to get it a good deal faster than its default speed, as we'll discuss in the section on overclocking.

Along with the card, itself, you get the installation CD, an adequate installation manual (though more useful information can be found in digital form on the CD), an an adapter cable for those who don't have S-video input on their TV's and need to convert to composite.

The software on the CD includes a copy of PowerDVD, a fairly standard offering with new video cards and a pretty good program for DVD playback, outdated drivers for the card (do yourself a favor and download the latest drivers either from Hercules' web site or from NVIDIA's) and some demos that you probably won't spend much time with anyway. Just the same, it's nice to have something immediately available that shows off what the card can do, rather than have to look for a new game that will do so.