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Introduction
With such strong demand for information on all the available NVIDIA GeForce 256 based boards, we’ve been working hard to bring you what you’ve been asking for. As soon as the boards arrive, they’re reviewed for your viewing pleasure. Arriving just a tad late for the last GeForce review (ELSA Erazor X and Outrageous 3D GeForce Review), the ELSA Erazor X² (Elsa’s GeForce-card equipped with DDR-memory) had to be tested separately but we’ll still give you the low down on rival GeForce boards as well as the competing graphics boards based on other chipsets in the market today. With so many choices being released based on the GeForce 256, things are becoming more and more difficult to choose which board to go with. Drivers, driver interface, software package, hardware performance and cost are all huge factors that everyone should look into before making a final decision. Hopefully we can add to your arsenal of knowledge as we bring you the scoop on ELSA’s Erazor X2.
The Company
ELSA is a German company that we are very familiar with since they have tried to separate themselves from your average NVIDIA based graphics board with high self-set standards that rival that of even NVIDIA. ELSA made it publicly clear that they didn’t feel the NVIDIA’s SDR reference design was up to their standards and decided to spend some additional time to “improve” the reference design. Most of these improvements were to help the manufacturing of the boards versus actually giving the customer some added benefits. This was a rather bold move being that it would cost them a bit of lag time compared to their competitors. The trade hasn’t seemed to pay off yet since there haven’t been any major problems with graphics boards based on the standard GeForce design. However, it is important to note that ELSA did go out of its way to try to improve upon what was considered to be “good enough.” This just further supports the ELSA’s track record of quality, performance and innovation. I’m all for the added efforts, as long as the trade-offs don’t hit the cost of the product too hard.
Erazor X²
This time around ELSA didn’t try to improve upon the reference design of the GeForce but instead they opted to follow the reference design that seems to be working just fine for everyone else making a GeForce DDR card. The board uses 6ns DDR SGRAM (click here for more information on what DDR memory is) and has the same miscellaneous chips that the Leadtek board uses (minus the DVI components). The graphics card offers the same basic features that all the GeForce 256 DDR based cards have: excellent fill-rate, hardware T&L, top notch OpenGL support, respectable DVD playback and excellent memory bandwidth. The combination of these features adds up to what we consider the industries overall best performing hardware. Not only do the theoretical numbers in regards to fill-rate and memory performance shine but the real world performance of this chipset also proves it. For those of you unfamiliar with the theoretical fill-rate and memory bandwidth potentials of the GeForce and competing chipsets, you can take a peek at the table below.
Graphics Card | Fill-Rate | Memory Bandwidth |
NVIDIA GeForce 256 DDR | 480 Mpixels/sec | 4.8 GB/sec |
NVIDIA GeForce 256 SDR | 480 Mpixels/sec | 2.656 GB/sec |
ATI Rage Fury MAXX | 540 Mpixels/sec | 4.96 GB/sec |
S3 Savage 2000 | 250 Mpixels/sec | 2.48 GB/sec |
Keep in mind that these numbers are in theory and that there are many factors such as driver performance and architecture efficiency that alter real world performance.
Aside from the incredible fill and memory performance we must not forget that it currently is the only graphics card with functioning hardware T&L support. Currently we’re only seeing minor advantages from the T&L on games like Quake Arena but as next generations of games come out, we’ll see games that may depend heavily on a T&L unit like the one in the GeForce. However, I’ve still not seen many T&L titles planning to be released in the very near future and we’ll have to wait another few months before something truly takes advantage of this mathematical powerhouse.
So what’s in the actual package you get from ELSA? It comes with the card, drivers (which includes a few of the ELSA utilities) and CD sampler disk. The Sampler disk includes a bunch of demo games and the all-important SoftDVD player (called ELSA movie).
The only non-GeForce specific feature that the Erazor X² adds is Video-Output. Other than that, you have a pretty basic DDR GeForce board aside from the ELSA video drivers that we will get to later on in the review.
The Features
Here I’ve gathered a table of all the various GeForce cards to give you an idea of what the ELSA Erazor X² has to offer compared to the other GeForce based boards.
Graphics Card | Price | Memory Type | Video | Custom Drivers |
ELSA Erazor X² | $299 | 6ns DDR SGRAM | Video out | Yes |
Asus V6600 Deluxe | $279 | 5ns SDR SGRAM | Video in/out | Yes |
Creative Labs Annihilator | $229 | 5.5ns SDR SDRAM | None | Yes |
ELSA Erazor X | $229 | 5.5ns SDR SDRAM | None | Yes |
Absolute Multimedia Outrageous 3D | $265/$285 | 6ns DDR SGRAM | Video out | No, uses NVIDIA reference drivers |
LeadTek Winfast GeForce 256 DDR | $279 | 6ns DDR SGRAM | Video out | Yes |
LeadTek Winfast GeForce 256 SDR | $229 | 5ns SDR SDRAM | Video out | Yes |
The one big that you’ll notice is that the ELSA Erazor X² is a little more expensive than the rest of the DDR we’ve tested. As far as features and design go, the Erazor X2 doesn’t offer anything out of the ordinary yet costs about $20 more. If anything, the Erazor X2 offers slightly less than the competition being that it doesn’t have a software bundle as good as the other boards.
Athlon Compatibility
In the last GeForce round up I had mentioned seeing possible issues when pairing an Athlon with a GeForce based board. After solving my own problem and helping a few others isolate the issue, I’ve come to the conclusion that all can be saved as long as you have the latest AMD AGP driver and a NVIDIA driver that is at least 3.62 or higher. Anything short of that may cause your system to be rather unstable in 3D applications.
Driver Interface
There are very minor differences between the Erazor X and X² driver interface (click here to check out the driver interface). The overclocking option has mysteriously disappeared with this driver and there is an added property window for the video out options that you can see below.
The added video control can be pretty handy especially for those of you who have televisions that don’t seem to center with the video out. Flicker, brightness and saturation controls come in handy sometimes as well.
Overall the driver interface is just as functional as the Erazor X with the exception of the overclock window being gone. You’ll have to use Powerstrip until ELSA puts the overclock utility back in.
Competing Chipsets
Although a whole lot hasn’t changed since we took a look at the competition, I have managed to get a little more information on upcoming competition. Let’s take a look.
We’re all waiting to see how well the 3dfx Voodoo5 series of chips are going to do when the finally come out but it’s not clear just how well this card will do being that it has been released so late and it lacks hardware T&L. 3dfx speculated that 32-bit color wasn’t ready yet way back but the demand was there and companies like NVIDIA, Matrox, S3 and ATI capitalized on their mistake. The same mistake could possibly be happening with the Voodoo5 line lacking hardware T&L. However, until this release, the flagship product is the aging Voodoo3 3500 product that isn’t cutting it with today’s competition.
Recently ATI has taken the plunge into the high-end graphics scene with the ATI Rage Fury MAXX product. Although ATI is doing well in the OEM market, they decided to offer their customers an enthusiast level of hardware with the MAXX. An improved MAXX should surface sometime in the summer with rumored higher clock speeds and hardware T&L support.
Diamond/S3 has also been busy working on their latest creation, the Viper II that has drawn much attention but has also let quite a few people down. Promises of super high fill-rates and hardware T&L were in the minds of the masses but when the product came out with slower fill-rates than expected and drivers lacking T&L support, many have lost faith in S3’s promises. In the next few weeks we might be seeing the T&L enabled driver appear in a limited form and we can expect an enhanced Viper II this quarter with higher clock speeds and a larger memory pool. Things had better come together for their own sake or they will have trouble selling these boards.
Matrox has been very quiet still with what’s going on in their future product line and although they’re selling a decent amount of G400 based boards, they’ll need to have something a bit more competitive in the future if they want to stay on top of things. Don’t get me wrong, the G400 MAXX is an expensive, but ok card. However in the few months, it’ll be uncompetitive as a high-end graphics board.
Lastly we have upcoming chipsets from NVIDIA themselves. Recently NVIDIA had crucial product information leak about their upcoming products and many of us were able to find out about the upcoming chipsets that will be surfacing sometime next quarter. After seeing some of the statistics, the notion that 3dfx would be blowing the doors off the competition in the fill-rate area no longer mean as much now that we know what NVIDIA has up its sleeves. Not only will NVIDIA have fill-rate and memory performance backing them, they’ll also be ahead in the T&L area. Unfortunately we cannot go into much detail about these upcoming chipsets but we can say that the threat that once loomed over NVIDIA is no longer a big deal.
Looking at what’s coming in the near future, the obvious chipset of choice is the GeForce 256 coupled with a DDR memory solution. The hardware, software drivers and feature set that it offers is leading edge and most likely will be the card to have for the next couple of months until 3dfx and/or NVIDIA releases their new chipsets.
Benchmark Expectation
As we’ve seen with previous GeForce DDR reviews, the Erazor X² should blow the doors off the competition. I would expect the performance of this board to be second to no one but an overclocked Erazor X2. The CPU will limit the low-resolution performance, but at medium to high resolutions coupled with 32-bit color, we’ll see the Erazor X2 lunge ahead of any competitor.
Overclocking
Unfortunately I didn’t have as much luck overclocking the core speed of my Erazor X² as I did with my Leadtek WinFast GeForce DDR or Outrageous DDR GeForce. I did manage to get the board to run stable at 135MHz core and 355 MHz memory speed. I was able to get a few runs at higher clock speeds but the quality would fall off or the tests would freeze. If you’re overclocking and the video quality gets “grainy” or discolored you’re probably beyond what the card can be clocked at. Overclocking will vary from card to card and you most likely will experience unstable performance if you take things too far. Remember, it is possible to damage your card permanently if you’re not careful about adding additional cooling for those extreme settings.
Benchmark Setup
A few small notes about the drivers used in our testing. We used the latest stable and bug-free drivers. If a driver was fast in most of our testing, but crashed in one application, we resorted to the next newest version. This was the case with the Matrox G400 driver.
Hardware Information | |
CPU | PIII 550 |
Motherboard (BIOS rev.) | ABIT BX6 2.0 (BIOS date 7/13/99) |
Memory | 128 MB Viking PC100 CAS2 |
Network | Netgear FA310TX |
Driver Information | |
ELSA Erazor X² | 4.12.01.0104-0020 |
3dfx Voodoo3 3500 | 4.11.01.1213 |
ATI Rage Fury MAXX | 4.11.7925 |
Diamond Viper II | 4.11.01.9001-9.01.10 |
ELSA Erazor X | 4.12.01.0100-002 |
Matrox G400 MAX | 4.11.01.1410 w/TurboGL 1.00.001 |
Environment Settings | |
OS Version | Windows 98 SE 4.10.2222 A |
DirectX Version | 7.0 |
Quake 3 Arena | Retail version command line = +set cd_nocd 1 +set s_initsound 0 |
Shogo | V2.14 Advanced Settings = disable sound, disable music, disable movies, disable joysticks, enable optimized surfaces, enable triple buffering, enable single-pass multi-texturing High Detail Settings = enabled Fortress Demo |
Descent III | Retail version Settings = -nosound -nomusic -nonetwork -timetest |
3DMark 2000 | 16-bit settings = 16 bit textures, 16-bit Z-buffer, triple buffering 32-bit settings = 32-bit textures, 24-bit Z-buffer, triple buffering |
Benchmark Results – Shogo
At the lowest resolution we test Shogo at, the Erazor board is being severely held back by the processor. Keep in mind that when this is the case, sometimes a slower card might show higher performance due to the margin of error. In any case, you’ll notice that the GeForce based board still dominates the top spots.
Things are shaken up a bit as the resolution climbs and some of the cards take a larger hit than others. The GeForce boards remain on the top but the DDR GeForce board hasn’t really pulled away yet.
Now that we’ve made things as tough as they can be in Shogo, only the overclocked Erazor X² pulls ahead of the Erazor X well.
Benchmark Results – Descent 3 DirectX
Here we have a classic example of the CPU being the bottleneck and give people confusing results. Keep in mind that the benchmarks have a small margin of error that become very apparent when you have a low-resolution benchmark and video boards running nearly identical drivers. One of the ‘slower’ boards may appear to be slightly ahead of the ‘faster’ boards but it’s all due to the margin of error coming into play as the CPU generates scores that vary 1-2%.
Now that we’ve put more work back onto the graphics cards, things fall into their proper order. The Erazor boards are all relatively still close in performance.
All the Erazor boards are performing very well but the X² isn’t really giving a huge advantage probably because we’re still in 16-bit color and memory bandwidth isn’t an issue.
Benchmark Results – Descent 3 OpenGL
Thanks to the refined NVIDIA OpenGL driver, the Erazor boards perform as well as they did in DirectX. We can’t say that for many of the other boards.
Even at 1024×768 resolution the DDR GeForce boards continue to put 100+FPS performance down while the Erazor X falls nearly 20 FPS behind.
The Erazor X²’s continue to blow past the competition as the Erazor X falls right next to the Rage Fury MAXX.
Benchmark Results – Quake Arena Normal setting
Up top we have the Erazor X’s taking the top spots while most of the competition follows closely behind.
Here we have the Erazor X² showing why it’s worth the extra cash as it pulls ahead by over 10%.
In the highest normal setting we use in Quake Arena, the Erazor X² continues to flex its muscles are it keeps over a 15% lead this time around.
Benchmark Results – Quake Arena High Quality setting
Now that we’ve switched to high quality settings things are a bit different at low resolution. You can see that the faster cards are already showing their value as they pull slightly ahead. You’ll notice that the Viper II nearly catches the Erazor X while in this setting.
If you’re going to play Quake Arena at a relatively high quality setting, you’d better take a look at this and see why you’ll want an Erazor X² over an Erazor X. The SDR GeForce falls off heavily as even the Rage Fury MAXX and Viper II pass it up by a small margin.
Our last test is by far our toughest as all the graphics board in our test fall miserably short of the 30 FPS barrier that we mark as a minimal acceptable framerate. You will notice, however, that even the competing cards nearly match the performance of our base clocked Erazor X².
As far as hardware performance goes, the Erazor X² has shown us what we had expected as it easily dominated our test suite against the competing chipsets available at the moment. Aside from other DDR based GeForce boards, the Erazor X2 is second to none.
Conclusion
ELSA is adding yet another top-notch choice to the list of cards worthy of costing nearly $300 dollars as it offers leading edge performance 3D performance. ELSA is offering the basics like a DVD player and some bundled demos but nothing spectacular over the other available DDR GeForce cards yet they are charging a slightly higher price.
I can’t quite see a compelling reason to go out and buy the Erazor X² over the Leadtek WinFast GeForce DDR or the Outrageous 3D GeForce DDR board unless it is of importance to you to have the ELSA brand and support. Granted they supply a sturdy driver, but most of the companies are offering drivers based on the reference drivers from NVIDIA, so that isn’t a very good reason either.
My final judgment on the Erazor X² is that it’s an average DDR GeForce board at a high price. Unless the ELSA board is the only thing available in your area, I see no reason why you shouldn’t go with the Leadtek or Absolute Multimedia solutions. My favorite GeForce DDR is still that Leadtek WinFast 256 DDR that offers a solid board, good software bundle, and is widely available all at a low price. You can’t go wrong with any of the DDR solutions but why spend the extra $20?