When does one need to read a review on video cards? usually when upgrading?, or when contemplating purchasing a new system?. In both cases, we wanted to give a realistic view of how the card performed. To do this, we carried out our test on a run of the mill Intel Pentium PIII - 500 based system, with 64Mb of ram.

Guillemot is not a name that rolls of your tongue when contemplating purchasing a new video card, but the 3D Prophet in its SDR incarnation is an awesome force to be reckoned with. Guillemot where unable to send us the DDR version in time to meet our strict deadlines, but has promised to let us have one at a later date. We were rather disappointed but were assured the SDR version would not disappoint. We were keen to get our grubby little paws on the card.

The card arrived in a neat retail box, with all the necessary cables for TV-out connectivity, CD ROM based drivers and plenty of add-on software including Direct X 7, XPing DVD 2.05, Acrobat Reader 4, DXMedia 6.00 and other useful utilities.

Inclusion of these utilities saves a lot of time downloading and installing at a later date, a multi-lingual manual with easy to follow instructions, certainly more than adequate for a beginner.

Installing the 3D Prophet (we love the name, the marketing potential is huge with a name like this ' does the mountain come to Mohammed'? or does Mohammed go to the mountain? we shall find out later...) is a breeze, remove your system cover, simply insert into the AGP slot, boot the system and install the drivers, and you are done. You are also presented with options to install the additional software supplied if you so wish. So far, so good...

The next item on the agenda was to change the resolution and test the card as supplied no tweaks at this stage. Whilst changing the resolution of the card from the standard 640 x 480 to 1024 x 786 - High Colour (16 bit), we encountered a strange problem, it would not remain on the new resolution, but defaulted back to 640 x 480, indeed a rare problem not encountered in our labs before. We do like challenges and so set out to investigate, a quick visit to Guillemot's web site, download the latest driver (ver 3.77) and hey presto! Problem resolved. The problem stems from using a plug and play monitor as this does not let the drivers set the resolution of the monitor to it's optimum level to support the new selection.

We did however speak with Guillemot's support department, they acknowledged the problem and have undertaken to ensure the new updated drivers are shipped with the card, we have no doubt they will do so. Incidentally, getting through to their support department was no problem couple of rings and you were through, and dealt with efficiently and courteously, this earns Guillemot extra brownie points.

Having resolved the resolution problems, we ran our 3D Mark 2000 tests with Direct X ver 7.0 installed as supplied by Guillemot on their CD ROM disk. The result was an impressive 24.2 Winstones for business applications and 3724 3D Marks, proving that's its no slouch at DirectX games, either.

Were we content with that? of course not, we were really going to tweak this baby and push it to it's limit. Tweaking is controversial to say the least. Is there a limit to tweaking? and how much do you tweak? we wanted to ensure any tweaking we did was only to the extent of it being useful i.e. you could do the same with your system which has now passed it's sell by date, after all if you can't afford to purchase a new system but have the need to increase speed a video card would be perfect as an upgrade.

The best tweak is to increase the Core and Memory Clock Frequencies (See figure 2) in stages of 5MHz and testing the new settings to establish whether your system can cope with it.

Having changed the frequencies to 145MHz for the Core Clock and 180MHz for the Memory Clock, we reached the optimum level for this method of tweaking. Any more results in a loss of performance.

"We can hear you asking what was the score then?" we hope you will be as pleasantly surprised as we were. An astounding increase to 3958 3D Marks, this makes the 3D Prophet the cream of the 32Mb GeForce crop of cards currently available. Move over Peugeot and Renault Guillemot is the new French kid on the block. There's a high quality fan on the heatsink itself, which really does keep the card cool - ours barely got warm even when we were pushing it.

The card comes with a TV out connector for S-VHS, a comprehensive manual, a DVD player, a few games and utilities.

All in all, the card maybe be pricey at £170.00 but think of it as an investment well made. The mountain did come to Mohammed and the 3D Prophet has come to us, we will be sorry to part with it, and is a worthy winner of our Performance award.

Test Specifications -
PIII 500 CPU
Epox BX3 Motherboard
64Mg 7ns PC100 SDRAM
IBM DNJA-3713500 13.5Gb 7200rpm HDD
Creative 48X CD-ROM