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Avoid Hercules like the plague.

B

Ben-mod

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 26, 2003
Messages
281
Last year I decided to purchase a Hercules 9700 Pro. Out of all of the 9700 vid cards, it looked the coolest and had some good heatsinking already on it, so I got it. ($400 or so)

The Hercules 9700 pro went into the first computer I ever built by myself. The computer from the get go suffered from instability, which I thought was being caused by processor heat. So I water cool my CPU, add a million fans, nothing, still unstable. So one day I notice that sometimes my comp crashes even in windows for no reason. I would notice suddenly that windows was looking distorted and then the comp would turn off. So I pulled the vid card out, swapped a new one in, and bam, no problems. So I call hercules set up an RMA, no problem.

So here is why Hercules sucks.

First problem.

1.The vid card I get back is red PCB, i sent them back a blue PCB, not a big problem, just cosmetic, but annoying.

2. Theres blue check marks all over the capacitors. Pretty obvious that someone was checking over this vid card for problems. Why would someone be checking it for problems? Because this vid card was someone elses vid card that was RMA'ed. So Hercules sent me back a broken vid card.


The vid card I got back from Hercules was from the get-go unstable and always crashed randomly. I tested it in a few comps, and the results sucked.

On my giga-byte GA-8INXP it was very unstable. On an Asus A7N8X-E-Deluxe, which is brand new, the computer would not even turn on with this card plugged in. That same computer however would turn on with an Nvidia-TI4600 or an FIC 9800 pro plugged into it. On all my comps, the card was unstable.

I call up ranting on the phone, and the guy says "They test the cards before sending them out"...... Cough cough... bullshit? Obviously they didnt test it very well
:rolleyes:

So here I am again, waiting two weeks for a vid card. Any company that returns a broken video card, with another broken video card, needs to be avoided.
 
Not to disagree with you, but every ATI card I've ever bought has check marks on the capacitors...and all of mine were bought retail. I am not discounting your story...just telling you that part of it is normal.
 
Hah, a mark on a capacitor could mean anything. They could have been put there at any point in the videocard's lifespan. Finding these marks doesn't mean anything, sorry. Nonetheless, I hope you get this problem resolved with Hercules.
 
Sounds like a power supply problem. Brand, voltage? Also, not everything is the manufacturer's fault. Some brand _____ cards are incompatible with _______ brand products. Neither company cares to fix it.
 
Maybe if you're talking about the several power supplies on the card itself, but his post seemed to imply that he tested the card on multiple computers with presumably different power supplies.
 
I did, the card was tested with different computers and different power supplies, an Enermax, an antec, and an Aspire Turbo. Also, the original vid card I sent them, had no marker on the capacitors.
 
An RMA will almost always result in getting a refurb card back. Sorry that you got a bum card back from them. Are new 9700pro's being made anymore?
 
Not to beat a dead horse, but look in the "show off your vid' card" Sticky and try to find a modern card that DOESN'T have blue marks on the capacitors. I can only assume that this is a quality control technique, and is a good thing. Just to put in my .02's
 
sounds like some user error...
there had to be something you were doing wrong....
and the checkmarks are on just about every card...
 
It's very normal to get a refrub product back from any manufacture as a RMA replacement. Your card get put in a pile of cards to be looked at and fixed later. Then later someone might get your card as a RMA replacement. In most rare cases you will get a "NEW" or a "NEW upgrade" but rare with the upgrade being very rare.

Check marks or writing on product is very normal; this just indicates that the cards went though a test or check point and was deemed ok. Just because your underwear has been inspected by #13 stickers on it does not mean its used underwear...

I do understand that you still have a problem, and at this point I would suspect other things as well, (not just the video card) as this is a replacement card and doing the same thing. I think it is very good on them to send you a second replacement card just to make sure.

Best of luck...
 
About half a year ago a sent hercules back a 8500 128 card, only to get a replacement that worked less than the one i sent in! It had multiple capaicitors missing and or hanging off by one soder contacta and the heatsink pins were broken too. Not only that but it took them a month to send me the broke ass card. it took many e-mails with pictures of the broken rma card before they would exchange it again. The second card they sent worked great and i had them pay for shipping on the second card.

Don't take the blame they can make mistakes in the rma process, if you think it's broken and can prove it they should take it back again.
 
QC marks caps. I worked at a PCB plant for a while, we did that on ones that got pulled for QC.
 
Thanks for all the feed back on the marker, My personal vid cards just dont have the marker on the capacitors so I thought that was odd, now I know better :) However the card they sent me back is definitely faulty. I tested it in multiple machines, where several other vid cards worked fine, but this card would not work. Thats why I got so pissed, they obviously didnt test this vid card very well before sending it to me.
 
OMFG man, your sending a card back because it has marks on the capacitors? Wow.......

The early 9700 boards all had marks across the capacitors, and my hercules 9800pro does. I've had zero issues with it, great card.
 
Originally posted by Icewindius
OMFG man, your sending a card back because it has marks on the capacitors? Wow.......

The early 9700 boards all had marks across the capacitors, and my hercules 9800pro does. I've had zero issues with it, great card.
Click to expand...

Im pretty sure hes sending it back because it didnt work on several of his machines. Good luck getting it fixed, I hate waiting for things like RMA's, especially when you get a bum product back, my bro just recently went through about two sent-cracked resivoirs on a system.
 
Originally posted by Icewindius
OMFG man, your sending a card back because it has marks on the capacitors? Wow.......

The early 9700 boards all had marks across the capacitors, and my hercules 9800pro does. I've had zero issues with it, great card.
Click to expand...


Read the thread before posting :rolleyes: , I sent the card back because it crashes constantly on multiple machines.
 
Felt markings on capacitors are very common. The majority are checked in that manner. I've got an Intel mobo, got directly from Intel that has felt markings on the caps. It would be a little scarier to not have the checkmarks on it IMO.

I think its a verification, sort of the "POTS OK" sticker on most powersupplies.
 
As for instability, it can be anything... But it is rare for a Videocard to cause a spontanous crash.

Videocard problems will usually cause a DX error which dumps back to the OS, or visual artifacting in the application iteslf, or something like that. Even when people say "it dumped back to the OS with a corrupted screen", I usually tell them to test the main motherboard memory first.

As suggested many times before, run memtest for a couple of hours. www.memtest.org

If not, the second place I would try would be swapping out powersupplies.
 
I constantly see hurcules products out-performing other products of the same model on the market- which can be seen in most of the comparos that [H] does. I was thinking of buying a new hercules card myself when I got the cash for one.

I had a similar experience with Soyo- I sent them back a bios-messed up board and got back a board with only one working ide slot. I still have it actually I didn't want to fuck with it.

GG RMA's

~Adam
 
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