ELSA Erazor X and Absolute Multimedia Outrageous 3D GeForce Review – THG.RU

Introduction

Two months have passed since we brought you the first Battle of the Titans and now we’ve gathered all our GeForce based cards along with a couple of new faces to bring you part three. This follow up comes for our many confused readers who have asked the not-so-simple question, “Which GeForce 256 board should I buy?” Our latest showdown will hopefully give you a helping hand in figuring out which GeForce based card suites your needs, from SDR to DDR. We’ll take a look at the competition from competing chipsets to comparing each of the GeForce boards to one another. Picking the best board in a group of similarly powered cards won’t be easy but someone has to do it. Who else out there has the guts to do it? You got it, Tom’s Hardware.

The New Guys

Our latest two boards to review are the ELSA Erazor X (SDR based) and Absolute Multimedia Outrageous 3D (O3D) DDR that are both based on the NVIDIA GeForce 256 chipset. The Erazor X comes from ELSA a very reputable company in the graphics industry that is based in Germany. ELSA is well known for bringing high quality and performing graphics products to consumer as well as professional users around the world. Innovation and top quality graphics products are something we have come to expect from ELSA these days. Where we see most manufacturers stick to the reference designs, ELSA takes the extra step in trying to enhance that design even if it is already “good enough.” Bold decisions like these have been known to help make or break companies. Taking the extra steps to improve upon reference designs can be costly in the time and money department (aren’t they the same?). This can be extremely painful if the design brings up its own flaws that weren’t in the reference design. However, this hasn’t been the case and ELSA has done extremely well. You will see an example of this custom work with the Erazor X as it has a custom design of its own.

Absolute Multimedia is a “newbie” to this group of experienced players and offers not only graphics solutions but audio as well. It started doing business by selling TNT2 and Aureal based products early on. This company that is based in Sweden was kind enough to send a board for review so we took them up on the offer. Not everyone has the guts to send in boards for review these days. We’ll see how well the new guy measures up the big boys in our competition.

Erazor X

The Erazor X is ELSA’s SDR based GeForce 256 board that has a very clean non-reference layout that saves quite a bit of space that cuts down manufacturing costs and in turn just might save you a few additional dollars. Another hardware difference between this card and the rest of the GeForce boards is the ELSA ChipGuard feature that monitors the GPU temperature and the fan speed. If either has problems, the card will safely shut itself down and reboot with a message that something has occurred.

The board comes packaged with a software DVD player and some sample software that isn’t too thrilling but the DVD player itself is very useful. If you pick up the 3D Revelator, you

also get a nifty little cable that gives you the ability to hook up the 3D Revelator glasses. Check out the items below.

The optional 3D glasses will run you about $50 extra dollars but you may find them worth the cash. These glasses are wireless and are pretty comfortable. If you wear glasses like me however, don’t both trying to wear both because it becomes very uncomfortable. Although the glasses from Asus aren’t wireless, they are able to fit over glasses quite well. The fun of these 3D glasses varies greatly from person to person and depends on the application as well. Some games look much more convincing (like Expendable) than others.

Outrageous 3D

The O3D by Absolute Multimedia is a DDR GeForce board that follows the reference design. The card does provide for a TV-out option on the back and appears to be of decent quality, as I didn’t experience any problems during my testing. The package is shipping in two varieties that vary only by the number of free software titles you may choose from but you do get the standard software DVD player either way so you at least get the basics. The choices of software that are currently available are: Superme Snowboarding, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Driver, UEFA Champions League 1998-1999, Unreal Tournament, Colin McRae Rally, Sin, TOCA 2, Space Invaders, Rollcage, Heretic II and Astroids.

To get an overview of the previously reviewed GeForce cards, please see:

• Battle of the Titans: Creative Labs Annihilator vs. Leadtek WinFast GeForce 256
• Asus AGP-V6600 Deluxe Review
• Leadtek WinFast GeForce 256 DDR Review

All in all, the software bundles are really a subjective matter as to what you might like but please note that ALL the cards came with a SoftDVD player so you’ll never miss out in that department.

The Features

You can take a peek at the various non-chipset related options chat below to see which card has what.

The prices of most of the cards are about the same when comparing to their respective memory type. The memories used are also very similar in speed and you will notice that 6 ns SGRAM is the memory of choice for the DDR boards. All but the Creative Labs and the Erazor X have video out capabilities while the O3D is the only board that is running reference drivers (which isn’t necessarily bad). You’ll notice two prices for the O3D as it has two versions. The OEM (cheaper) gives you one free piece of software (that you choose from a list) and the retail version that gives you three choices. There really isn’t a whole lot of variety between all these cards aside from a few minor differences.

Athlon Issues

It was brought to my attention that there were still random issues between GeForce based products and Athlon systems. After receiving tons of emails from troubled Athlon/GeForce owners (mind you this wasn’t with any particular brand but a variety), I decided to look into it myself on my home system where I play quite a bit of Quake Arena. I installed my new Athlon system at home and within 5 minutes of play, I froze. After a few hours of troubleshooting the driver revisions and tweaking the BIOS, I came up without an answer to the problem. I had even tried the latest NVIDIA reference drivers and nothing helped. This is very distressing to many people and my sympathy goes out to you. We will continue to look into this issue, interviewing AMD and NVIDIA on this rather annoying and somehow disheartening topic. The odd part about it is that not everyone is experiencing these issues. I personally doubt that those problems are a problem of the Athlon-processor, neither do I suspect any flaw in GeForce’s design. My best guess is that we’ll have to blame Athlon’s chipset for those random lockups. The available Athlon platforms, which are still only based on AMD’s rather ‘old fashioned’ ‘Irongate’ chipset are anyway by far the weakest spot of any Athlon-system. Thus the best solution for this issue might be new chipsets. VIA’s upcoming KX133-chipset that will finally offer state-of-art AGP4x, PC133 and some more will hopefully proof to be free of any compatibility-issues and offer Athlon the platform it deserves. For now, I can only recommend that if you’re an Athlon owner looking at buying a GeForce card like the ones here in our review, keep in mind you may run into some issues.

Driver Interface – Erazor X

Here we have a slightly altered version of your standard settings display property window. Access to a detailed monitor configuration property window is available by clicking details.

This window allows you to set your monitor configuration. Probably only good for advanced users.

Here we have the basic information window that provides driver information as well as other low level information about the card.

Here we have all the DirectX driver options we’ll use and then some. Note that this driver lets you disable vsync in OpenGL without any additional tweaks.

Driver Interface – Erazor X, Continued

There aren’t any special options in this window other than your standard OpenGL switches.

Here we have the all-important overclocking property window that is built into the standard driver.

Here you can adjust the color levels of your desktop with a few sliders and can even create profiles.

We have the ability to balance the color settings for the video output here.

Overall I think the Erazor X drivers provide everything you’ll need from disabling VSYNC to an overclocking window. You have control over your most important settings and then some. The only thing I would have liked to see added would be a real time health monitor built into the info window or the overclock window.

Another small note I’d like to make is about my experience with the drivers once I started testing. I was forced to go back two driver revisions to have flawless testing. The first two drivers I used have visual issues but weren’t any faster. I ended up using the shipping CD to have reliable graphic quality and complete the tests. I want to make this clear before everyone emails me about the “old” driver I had used for the Erazor X.

Driver Interface – Outrageous 3D

A small note before we look at the O3D driver interface. The young age of the O3D is apparent when you install the drivers as it doesn’t have a very user-friendly install interface. Not only is it confusing but after you install the driver, it doesn’t seem to have done the right things to force a successful install. I was forced into installing the driver manually which isn’t a big deal but for the novice user, it might prove to be a bit painful.

Here we have what appears to be the NVIDIA reference information panel. You get look up basic card and driver information here.

If you haven’t noticed by now, this is the same interface as the NVIDIA reference drivers. This window holds all the OpenGL options and settings.

You’re provided with some basic sliders to fine-tune your visuals.

The only real useful option on this screen is the ability to enable a shortcut to your video settings through the taskbar.

Driver Interface – Outrageous 3D, Continued

If you need to adjust your color settings, this is the place to do so. You have the option to save color schemes if you wish to.

Tweaking the D3D is possible through the D3D properties window. You also have the option to enter even more D3D setting window from here as well.

Here are our additional D3D settings that I had mentioned before. It’s just a couple more tweaks available to you.

In the event that you hook up your video out, you are provided with some video out options.

After clicking on device settings in the previous window, you jump into this one that lets you make adjustments to your output video.

Overall the O3D driver interface provides you with the really simple settings and feature controls. If you want more control over things or fancy information screen on overclocking, heat monitoring or monitor settings, you’ll have to use something like PowerStrip or get a card with a better driver interface. The O3D definitely needs work in this area.

If you wish to review what the other GeForce card drivers look like, here are the links:

• Asus AGP-V6600 Deluxe
• Creative Labs Annihilator
• Leadtek WinFast GeForce 256 SDR/DDR

A few more notes to make after looking over all the OEM drivers is that some people may prefer some of the available settings over the other. Also, some OEM drivers do have functional advantages like overclocking or health monitoring tools that you may want. Lastly, one HUGE advantage that Creative Labs has over the competition is their Glide D3D wrapper in the form of what they call a Unified driver. This may come in handy for those legacy Glide only games or premier game demos that for some reason come out in Glide only initially.

Competing Chipsets

Currently there are a couple of new chipsets amongst a list of aging chipsets that have been offered. Let’s take a look at each company at a glance.

3dfx has been sitting on the VD3 3500 for quiet some time now as they’ve been having difficulties pushing its latest chipset out the door. Still, the Voodoo3-based cards are the best choice for Glide-games, as e.g. the brand new Ultima 9. In the next few months we should be seeing some exciting news from it but until then, its best product is very limited compared to the competition. I’ll definitely keep my eyes peeled for the next 3dfx line of products.

ATI has been pretty busy lately, as it has just released the Rage Fury MAXX not too long ago. This beast has shown some great potential and with the proper driver tuning and some weight loss on the price, it just might offer some stiff competition. Until that time, however, it still remains are an under performing card for the price. Future versions of this card are rumored to have a T&L engine integrated to match the awesome fill-rate performance.

Diamond/S3 also has a new weapon in their arsenal also known as the Diamond Viper II. This bad boy is probably the best bet for those wanting to give another chipset a shot in the time being. The drivers would use a little bit of polishing and the hardware T&L enabling driver would be a huge plus as well. The card shows some nice fill-rate and texturing performance but without drivers to back it up, this card might not be so attractive. Beefier versions of the Viper II are rumored to be just around the corner as well as a T&L enabled driver. We’ll keep you posted.

Matrox is still standing behind their G400 series of cards that seem to be selling very well although they’re not the best performing cards, they are backed by good drivers and solid support from Matrox. Dualhead video output is another cool feature that Matrox has on their side as well. Not too much information on what their upcoming products will be offering but we’ll keep you informed.

Finally, we don’t want to forget NVIDIA itself. Some information about GeForce’s successor has already leaked on the web, so that many of you may already know that NVIDIA won’t have any reason to fear Voodoo4/5 whatsoever. The stuff NVIDIA has up its sleeves will make sure that by the time the competition has caught up with Geforce, the next product(s) will continue to lead the pack in the PC-graphics arena by a rather comfortable margin.

As we look at the competition, there really isn’t a fast enough solution to keep up with the GeForce 256 based board in general. A couple of the competing boards are in the same ballpark in regards to performance as the SDR GeForce but don’t take top honors overall because of price and/or driver issues. Currently the GeForce chipset is still the best solution with its high fill-rate performance, hardware T&L and solid driver performance.

Benchmark Expectations

As all the cards are using the same chipset and only vary in the memory type they use, I don’t expect to see any cards faster than the other (when comparing similarly configured cards). The DDR GeForce boards will skyrocket past the SDR boards in high resolution/color benchmarks. You will not see a dramatic difference in performance unless you have a card that is overclocked or is equipped with DDR memory.

Overclocking

I went ahead and gave it a shot overclocking both of our new test boards with good success. The Erazor X has a pretty nice cooling solution but didn’t let me drastically overclock the device like you might think. As for the O3D board, it had a very easy time being pushed past its normal limits. I would like to note that all of the DDR based boards I’ve worked with have had a tendency to be able to clock their cores very high. I hear through the grapevine that DDR based GeForce cards do in fact have newer versions of the GeForce chip but that’s not officially verified to my knowledge. Keep in mind that when overclocking you are shortening the life span of your device and at these heat levels it is possible to kill a board quickly. The GeForce 256 isn’t a low power GPU and it will get very hot, very fast.

Benchmark Setup

Benchmark Results – Shogo

Our opening test has all the cards pretty even at the starting gate. Keep in mind that if one of the manufacturers have a drastically different driver with problems, it would be very apparent here. Everyone most likely uses the NVIDIA based reference .dll’s or something very close.

Everyone remains pretty even except the DDR and overclocked boards. The differences between the stock clocked cards are very minor.

Our obvious powerhouses, the DDR based boards and overclocked Erazor X, pull ahead as we expect them to. The only real surprise here is the Asus V6600 pulling a respectable amount ahead of the other SDR board. You can probably thank the SGRAM for that little victory.

Benchmark Results – Descent D3D

Everyone is within a frame of each other on this test. Our PIII processor is currently the bottleneck. Things should shake around as we raise the resolution shortly.

Most our boards are still fairly close to one another. As the cards start taking on more responsibility, we see our faster DDR boards take a bit of a lead.

As we saw with high resolution Shogo, the DDR and overclocked boards dominate the top of the list. The Asus V6600 still manages to out score the other stock SDR boards.

Benchmark Results – Descent OpenGL

Switching Descent to the OpenGL API, we should see similar trends in performance as we did in DirectX. This is largely due to the fact that NVIDIA has such a good ICD that you see nearly the same performance regardless of the API used in Descent3. Here we have all our cards pretty dead even.

Our overclocked O3D didn’t seem notice we changed resolution and kept it’s extremely high score. Keep in mind that we see variances in scores when things are this fast and the bottleneck is the CPU. At 1024×768, this is the case for the overclock DDR board.

At 1600×1200 in OpenGL, the DDR boards show you just why they’re worth their added costs.

Benchmark Results – Quake Arena Normal

We have a few add standings here because of the processor being the bottleneck. The margin of error on these tests will very enough so that you may see a DDR board be ever so slightly slower than an SDR one.

Now that we’ve moved the resolution up a bit, we can see things fall into their normal order of performance. Ever card is still performing very well but the DDR based GeForce boards are still taking the cake for best performers.

At our highest normal Quake settings, we see the pack fall into a familiar order of places. You’ll notice that on every one of our tests in resolutions where the CPU is no longer the bottleneck that the SDR GeForce boards stick very close to one another. You don’t have to worry much about buying one brand over the other for speed.

Benchmark Results – Quake Arena High Quality

At low resolution we are able to see some boards pulling ahead due to the high quality setting. The 32-bit color starts hogging memory bandwidth even at this low of a resolution.

Having spent the extra $50 for a DDR GeForce would prove its value in this test big time. Running Quake Arena at 1024×768 and high quality on a DDR GeForce board would run really smooth while you’ll probably not enjoy it when playing on a SDR GeForce board.

Raising Quake Arena to the highest setting we test at proves to be too much for any of our test cards, even our almighty overclocked DDR GeForce board. You can still clearly see that the DDR boards dominate the top spots with their superior memory bandwidth.

My conclusion to the actual graphics performance of our competitors is that a DDR GeForce is a must if you’re going to spend this type of money on a graphics card. It has been proven time and time again in our tests that the GeForce DDR dominates its SDR brother without much of a problem. Regardless of brand, the performance only really changes when memory types differ (going from SDR to DDR).

Conclusion

Let’s take a look at what each board has to offer before hearing my final judgments. Keep in mind that this decision is rather subjective because many of the extra offerings may hold more value with some than others. This is something you as a consumer have to decide on before making your final purchase. Also keep in mind that we’re basing at a decision with those cards that we have available at this time.

Asus is offering an SDR based board that is unique due to the fact that it is equipped with SGRAM when the rest of the SDR boards are using SDRAM. This advantage is very minor unless you’re into overclocking where the board seems to do extremely well. The V6600 Deluxe has a pretty clean and helpful driver interface and comes with the optional VR glasses (these are the best fit for people with glasses) that some people may enjoy.

Creative Labs is offering the base SDR GeForce board with the bare essentials back by a frequently updated driver. Creative is also supporting a Unified driver that gives Creative customers a Glide wrapper (this allows you to run Glide software without a 3dfx based graphics card installed). This board is widely available at a very competitive price. The only particular drawback to this board is that it doesn’t have a video out. This might not be important to people like me but to others, it’s huge.

ELSA has the slickest looking board (not that it makes games faster) armed with the unique ChipGuard feature and a solid driver interface. The price is right there with the competition and the board can be found on many of the big online stores. You unfortunately don’t get a video out option with this board but you do have an option to spend the extra $50 to get the 3D Revelator Glasses. As I said with the Creative board, not everyone needs video-out but it’s nice to have the available option.

Absolute Multimedia’s Outrageous 3D performs on par with the Leadtek DDR at a slightly lower price if you grab the single software version. You still get the DVD player and video out with this board but sacrifice driver interface quality and questionable support to save a few bucks. Although this board has been running beautifully in the lab for the past few days, I can’t promise that this board will meet the same quality standards as the other big players in the round up and last just as long as they would.

Leadtek is offering us two solutions (SDR/DDR) that are solid boards that come packed with a strong software bundle and a good driver interface. The DDR based WinFast board is a mere $50 more than the SDR board but the performance difference at times is night and day. If you like the Leadtek packages, there is no excuse not to get the DDR based board. The performance return for the addition $50 is worth every penny so don’t pass it up and regret it later on. You can also get the boards in a DVI version if you’re into flat panels or plan to buy one in the near future.

With six cards to choose from with the same powerful chipset, I knew this deciding wouldn’t be easy at all. The performances of the DDR boards are obviously superior to that of the SDR based boards but within their respective memory types, all the boards are basically dead even. The price you’re looking at to move from SDR to DDR is about $50 and that’s not much if you’re able to consider buying a near $250 graphics card in the first place. The additional software and miscellaneous features to be haven’t swayed my decision one-way or the other. Some boards are offering small perks but nothing that pulls me to a particular board. The first choice I made was that a DDR board would be a must. This leaves me with only two choices that are less than $20 difference in price. In the end, the Leadtek WinFast GeForce 256 DDR took my virtual money as I felt the additional peace of mind with a brand name that produces quality products and a solid driver GUI. With so many GeForce flavors out there that we’ve not reviewed yet, getting a GeForce DDR board in general won’t be a bad choice, it’s just a matter of finding one that suits your needs best.