Hercules chose to use the Radeon 9600 chip in its 3D Prophet 9600 but it chose to go completely over the top by specifying 256MB of memory, rather than the usual 128MB. Technically this makes no sense at all, as the Radeon 9600 isn't limited by its 'basic' 128MB of memory, and our test results show that the Hercules card is actually slower than the Connect 3D 9600.

It is clear that the extra memory is a marketing exercise that is intended to impress the gullible. We suspect the same is true of the eye catching graphics card, which is made from a blue PCB and has a copper-coloured heatsink fan unit, as well as individual heatsinks on the memory chips. It looks good but we know that that the Radeon 9600 design doesn't require all this cooling.

We suspected that we had found the answer on the driver CD, as Hercules supplies the Hercules 3D Tweaker LE overclocking utility. This allows you to raise the core and memory speeds by about 100MHz each, but we found that the card simply won't over-clock. There's no other software and we couldn't find a DVI-to-VGA adapter in the box, although you do get a TV-Out cable that splits to offer both S-Video and coaxial connections.

When the 3D Prophet 9600 was launched it cost £150, which is simply ridiculous. You can find it on sale for £115 which is far cheaper, but it's still £20 more than the Connect3D card. That makes it hard to recommend the Hercules, although we suspect that its cosmetic good looks will impress plenty of buyers on the high street.