Review: Hercules Radeon 9800 Pro

Performance, there's not much to say in that regard. It's fast. I'm tempted to say "so what, we knew it would be", but I'll fall short since it is important. What's more important to me is IQ and getting games looking as good as possible. Too many times you see a washed out screenshot of a game with no texture detail and you wonder why you bother spending upwards of £300 on a graphics card. It's all about the aniso these days. Turn it on! The cards let you do that now, framerate is no longer king.

So with that off my chest, is the card good value? Weighing up what you get for your near £400, I'd have to say not. It's undoubtedly good looking, you do get 900 metric tonnes of copper for your cash, and the LED will make some parts of the community explode with joy. The bundle makes up for it a little, you get a genuinely good £30 title for your hard earned.

But, I have to still tip my graphics hat to 9700 Pro at the moment, especially with the cost of the high end getting even higher. It's the most value for money at the time of writing, 9800 Pro just isn't worth near £400 unless you have inherited a small fortune, your premium bond came up or you've mugged a fair few old ladies this week.

Kudos to Hercules for building it, it'll get the crowd that can afford it weak at the knees. Indeed they already do, checking the overclocking forums on the internet and you'll see Hercules with a fair amount of 9800 Pro mind and market share.

It's just a little too much money, especially when 9700 Pro is nearly £200 now and 9700 non-Pro well under the double ton.

Exciting to test, but for the rich and OEM markets only. At least we'll all have performance like this in the midrange next year.

Overclocking

I had the card in the test rig for about 3 days before I had to get back to testing motherboards, but I did manage to do a spot of case fan assisted overclocking. 445MHz core, 392MHz memory were doable for some 3DMark. Your mileage will definitely vary however, it seemed like a very much above average overclocker. Maybe all that copper does help.

Score



Pro's

So very very fast
Simply excellent 2D image quality
Good bundled game
It lights up

Con's

Too expensive, even for a 9800 Pro
Not much else however, but its a big downside

Thanks

Jackie at Hercules' UK PR for the sample
Pathway for my Sapphire 9700 Pro
Komplett for the digital camera used to take the shots.