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| Quality
and Installation Of The Elsa Gladiac
Ultra |
| Let's
get down to business... |
|
When
we did our usual physical quality inspections, we
didn?t find anything negative to report.
We didn?t want to rip apart our new
Ultra, so we?re unsure what type of interface
material is used between the chipset and the
heatsink / fan combo. However, we did not
experience any heat related issues throughout
testing so we don?t think this is a huge issue.
As you?ll see a little later we had some
good luck overclocking this board in it?s stock
configuration.
One thing everyone
should notice is that although the feature set is
the same as any other GeForce 2, the Ultra
reference boards are quite different.
Here you?ll
immediately see that even compared ?side-by-side?
with Elsa?s non-Ultra 64MB Gladiac (reviewed
here), there are some major differences.
First, notice
the size difference of the heatsink / fan combo.
The cooler on the Ultra is approximately
15-20% larger.
Then there are the
obvious heatsinks on the RAM.
With an effective stock clock speed of
460MHz., it was wise to use something to keep the
chips running cool.
Everyone should remember though, that in a
poorly ventilated case where heat cannot escape,
heat sinks will actually warm what they?re
mounted to! If
you?re planning on adding an Ultra to that rig
of yours make sure you?ve got good
ventilation!
The
extra components mounted to the right of the RAM
are another fairly obvious difference.
These items are there to provide smooth,
clean power to the very fast 4ns DDR RAM on board.
Having these extra ?power filtering?
components on the board help insure stable
operation at what is a relatively high clock
speed. These
components also add to the overall size of the
board which is evident in the above picture.
What you?re looking at in the picture on
the right is a non-Ultra 64MB Elsa Gladiac sitting
on top of the newer Ultra model.
Because
we also opted for the optional Elsa Video Module,
we had a little bit of extra work to do before
installing our board into the test system.
Before...
After...
In
it's stock configuration, the Elsa Gladiac Ultra
has a single analog monitor connector
available. The optional video module comes
with a nut-driver to remove the front plate.
Once we had the plate removed, we connected the
video module and new front plate. With the
video module installed the Elsa Gladiac Ultra is
capable of video in and out.
Installation
of the drivers was as easy as every other
card. Plug and Play really has come a long
way :). Just set your display adapter to
"Standard VGA" and shut down your
system. Re-Boot and install the new drivers
at the "New Hardware found"
prompt...it's as easy as that. Once
installed, Elsa's drivers offer a good amount of
"tweakabilty". Here are some
screenshots to give you an idea of what to
expect...
There
is also a system tray icon installed that gives
you quick access to these options...
The
system tray icon gives you an easy to follow menu
to access all of the display properties.
This isn't anything new to the video card world
but anything that makes it easier to change your
settings is cool in our book.
Something
overlooked as of late is 2D image quality.
We're happy to report that with it's 350MHz RAMDAC
2D image quality is excellent.
FSAA,
Over-clocking and Gaming Performance
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