Manufacturer: Hercules Tech: AGP based S3 Savage3D w/ 8Mb Price: $85 - $100 esp Shipping: Early January 99

Three weeks ago SharkyExtreme reviewed the new Hercules Dynamite TNT video accelerator and found it to be a very capable product at an aggressive price. We congratulated Hercules on a job well done with the Dynamite at that time, and we speculated that Hercules seemed to have taken their first step on the long road back towards being a manufacturer of top of the line products.

The journey down that road to excellence for Hercules continues today, with a review of the yet-to-be-released Hercules Terminator Beast SuperCharged 8MB AGP video accelerator. Damn that's a mouthful, and this card deserves that long moniker in our estimation based mainly on the strong benchmarks we obtained from it.

More on that later….

Back in October, we reviewed the original Hercules Beast 8MB AGP video accelerator and found it to be a product that needed more refinement and raw speed before we could recommend it to the gaming audience. We liked the Beast's S3 texture compression "4X AGP" ability, the card's cost, and the Hercules Touch drivers that the card came with, but we felt that in-game performance was lacking along with being extremely buggy and unreliable in the games we tested it with.