One popular card, the 9800 Pro! It was sold by many brands of which Hercules was not the cheapest one. In the Netherlands the Club3D or Sapphire cards were often a tad cheaper and thus sold more.

This card doesn't differ much from the 256MB 9800 Pro, except that it has a smaller PCB, different cooling and a Hercules sticker.

As some of you may notice my Hercules card is red instead of blue. Hercules originally shipped blue 9800 Pro's but some red ones slipped through. I once heard someone saying that these are special versions but I just think that Hercules didn't have any blue PCB's left and took the normal red ones (which every other manufacturer used). However, an interesting twitch is the marking on the AGP connector. Besides 'A' someone wrote '8108' on it. > Read more

The GeForce FX didn't work out as hoped to be and the new chip from ATi was rocking! This card is based on the R350 chip, or in other words 'the powerful 9800 Pro'. The 256MB version wasn't sold much (who needed 256MB of graphics memory in 2003 or 2004?) but the 128MB version was sold in large quantities. Both the 9700 Pro and 9800 Pro got ATi back into play as most powerful graphics card in the world.

Why did this all happen? nVidia launched the GeForce FX too late and it was quite a warm chip (at least the high-end versions were) for it's time. ATi did exactly the opposite. Performance-wise it all comes down to vertex- and pixelshaders and DirectX 9. To make it short: the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra had a good fill-rate but it's shader-performance was terrible. The products from ATi had a normal fill-rate and a normal (but compared to the 5800 Ultra it was very good) performance with shaders. Except for games like Quake 3 (it doesn't use shaders and fill-rate means something in these games) the Radeon was screaming.

The only downsize on this card is that the cooling is quite minimal. If it had a larger heatsink/fan solution it could run more quiet and reliable. When it's new it's not such a problem but after a while of operation the dust comes in which causes trouble. Unfortunatly a lot of graphic cards suffer from minimal cooling after dust has formed in the heatsink. > Read more