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hate to say this but we were spoiled with the
cooling set up of the original Erazor X SDR
card. As we noted earlier, the heat sink on
this card is a basic stock model found on most
NVidia cards based on the reference design.
The larger more solid unit that we found on the
Erazor X SDR was much more capable of dissipating
heat than this solution. As a result, the
highest core clock speed we were able to achieve
was 125MHz. with the highest memory speed being
325 MHz. The memory clock speed achieved was
typical of other DDR cards we have tested that use
the same 6ns. Infineon DDR SGRAM chips that the
Erazor X2 uses. What was
surprising was the fact that we couldn't even get
close to the core clock speed of the Leadtek DDR
GeForce card we tested not too long ago. We
rate overclock capabilities of a card based on its
"out of the box" set up. Results
may vary from card to card, as we all should know
by now. Regardless, our experience in this
area with the Erazor X2 was not what we
would have expected after the great results we
received with the Erazor X SDR. Bring back
that old heat sink Elsa!! :)
Obligatory
Screen Shot Time!
This
time we decided to include a shot from a couple of
the bundled game demos that Elsa includes with the
Erazor X2. These are low
compression JPEGs so the file sizes of the full
screen shots are 100K+ each.
Click
here to see the 800X600 Rollcage shot!
Click
here to see the 800X600 MotoRacer 2 shot!
Both
Direct 3D titles, these two games have a high fun
factor and look great! Dig those sun
flares. In the MotoRacer shot, you can see
that I am about to give this dude a bit of a neck
cramp when my Kawaski 250 lands on his back!
:) We
took both shots at 1024X768 w/ 32 bit color and
then shrunk them down to 800X600 for better
viewing across the wide ranges of resolutions that
you folks run on the internet.
One
interesting note for the 3dfx vrs. NVidia types
out there, see those "jaggies" in the
MotoRacer shot? Look at the banner that
hangs over the track. Supposedly, Voodoo4/5
with full scene AA will make everything look
smooth. We'll see... Until then 3D
image quality at 32 bit color depths, with a
GeForce card, is top notch!
Let's
move out to the test track!
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