Elsa Erazor X2 GeForce DDR

Name: Elsa Erazor X2 GeForce DDR - Page 2
Brand: Elsa

by HH Editor — Saturday, December 15, 2001, 11:00 PM EDT

Elsa Erazor X2 GeForce DDR - Page 2

Page 2: Elsa Erazor X2 GeForce DDR - Page 2

The Elsa Erazor X²GeForce DDR
Double Data Rate Fun

Installation / Setup With the Erazor X²

No nonsense

Installation of Elsa products is usually a no nonsense affair. This time was no exception. The drivers installed quickly and we were able to configure our display and desktop, setting it up to our custom needs easily. Desktop image quality with the Erazor X²DDR was perhaps the best we have seen with any GeForce card. Resolutions all the way up to 1280X1024 on our 19" Sony, were crisp and clean.

In addition, the utilities that Elsa wraps around their drivers are well thought out and easy to use. Here's what one of the screens look like.

The Direct 3D tab has all of the elements of the standard NVidia driver with a few minor variations. Another nice feature that is standard with all GeForce cards, is the ability to change the brightness color, and saturation of the video overlay area. This will allow you to tweak the image of either DVD or TV Tuner output. What would have been nice would be the addition of the ability to tweak D3D, OpenGL and Desktop Gamma individually. However, we have yet to see this with any drivers based on NVidia reference drivers, which don't support this feature currently

Overclocking With The Erazor X²

We miss the heat sink on the Erazor X SDR

I 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 X²uses. 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 X²was 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!

Benchmarks and the low down, this way!