Prelude to Performance
The Dynamite TNT came in an OEM (white box) box with a CD containing the drivers (as well as the drivers for every other Hercules product), a registration card, and a pretty hefty installation guide. When I looked into the installation guide I realized that the reason it was so hefty is because, as with the CD-driver, the manual covered installation for every Hercules board in English and German. The manual does cover the installation process in detail and is very thorough, unfortunately, combining the installation of all the Hercules boards into one manual makes it very difficult to find what you are looking for. Don't expect to be able to skim through the installation guide to the part you need; the index is there for a reason.
Despite the manual's short comings, the installation of the
board went well. I opened the box, installed the board in the system, and booted up. Upon
bootup, the board was detected as an nVidia RIVA TNT, which was fine for the moment. I
went to Hercules' site to download the latest drivers and installed those using the
install program, rebooted, and everything went well. (The CD did not come with the latest
driver version) The drivers seemed to be nVidia reference drivers with a front end added
on by Hercules (in the form of Hercules Power Tools).
| The Hercules Power Tools are an excellent
addition, allowing for OpenGL and D3D tweaks, plus the Hercumeter, which allows for easy
overclocking of the Dynamite TNT. Speaking of overclocking, the Dynamite TNT is defaulted
to 98mhz clock, 125mhz memory, as opposed to the default 90/110 for competing TNT boards.
This was a good move by Hercules because the board runs rock stable at 98/125, plus
performance is significantly faster. As a matter of fact, Anandtech got the Hercules board
running stable at 110/125 without any extra cooling. Also, the Hercules utilities managed
to work flawlessly with all the extra tabs added from the Creative Labs TNT (Colorific and
3Deep), not that they shouldn't be able to... Hercules also supplies Power tools with 'Speedy', a quick easy to use 2D benchmark which tests basic GDI performance, such as Raster ops, screen to screen blit, memory to screen blit, text operations, polygon filled speed, etc. The OEM version Anandtech reviewed did not come with any games bundle. There wasn't really anything missing from the drivers, though I would have liked to have seen the overclocking slider engine clock speed go past 115, for those who want to super cool their board. Speaking of cooling, the Dynamite TNT fan managed to keep the card noticeably cooler than the Creative Labs TNT board while running games according to the unprofessional finger test. Hopefully I'll have some better temperature measuring equipment available soon... |
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slatanek - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Had this one assembled in my friends PC at the age of 16. those were the times...