Hercules 3D Prophet All-in-Wonder 9000 Pro

Graphics cards under the 'All-in-Wonder' banner have been in the shops since 1997 and all have had one thing in common: they combine several functions into one card.

The 3D Prophet All-in-Wonder 9000 from Hercules is the first we have seen based on the Radeon 9000 chip, which was launched last year.

With 64MB and an analogue Philips TV tuner, it offers an all-in-one solution for those who want to watch TV on their PC, have high-performance graphics and save on valuable expansion slots.

Installation is straightforward, although it's recommended that you uninstall the drivers of the graphics card you are replacing so that you don't get any conflicts.

What's unusual for a card like this is that it doesn't have a VGA, only DVI, which is great if you have a suitably equipped TFT monitor. Other users need not fret though, as the card is provided with a DVI to VGA converter.

An external box connects external devices using the S-Video, composite video and twin audio channel sockets. This box, through a plug-in USB receiver, is also used for the provided remote control.

It connects to one of the two ports on the card in a very messy way, as the sound output from the TV tuner has to be externally connected to your PC's sound input port.

As everybody wants to watch TV with sound, this connection would be better if it was internal.

Once connected, setting up the TV tuner is undemanding. With your TV aerial plugged in the back, all you need do is choose which type of channel search you want to run.

If you live in a built-up area, it recommends you run the fast search but if you live in a rural area where the signal might be weaker, there's an additional exhaustive search.

This took a maximum of five minutes and found all the main channels for us. Annoyingly, however, there's no fine tuning of TV channels once they are located.

Since you can use the card for watching cable channels, it also has a parental control feature if there are channels that you don't want younger people to access.

This is in the form of a password which must be entered in order to view the barred channels.In the same way as other methods of watching television on your PC, you can use it to record programmes.

Before doing this you will need to decide what level of quality you want. This will then affect the amount of space the recordings will take up on your hard disk.

As well as being able to watch television, you can also get Teletext and through the provided software, play DVDs, CDs and MP3s.

As with most TV tuners, you can also make it act as a digital video recorder and schedule television programme recordings.

If you've had a combined graphics card and TV tuner before, you may well have been disappointed by its performance. With the Hercules 3D Prophet All-in-Wonder 9000, this isn't the case.

The 3D performance was very good and identical to a standard Radeon 9000. The addition of a good TV tuner and all the features it has makes this a card seriously worth considering.

DETAILS
Price: £199
Contact: Hercules 020 8665 1881
www.hercules-uk.com

ALSO CONSIDER
Creative Labs 3D Blaster Home Cinema
A similar concept which uses an nVidia GeForce 2 card as its base.