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2D/3D CARD review Elsa Erazor X2
Over the years I've had the opportunity to look at a number of graphics accelerators from ELSA, the German manufacturer of graphics and other multimedia products. In general they've been very solid, stable products, but they've also been slower performing than their competitors - often, substantially slower. No longer. While the performance lags just a bit behind the fastest GeForce DDR cards, the difference is minimal. The Erazor X2 is based on Nvidia's GeForce 256 card, and it ships with 32MB of 6ns Infineon DDR SGRAM. Like similar cards, ELSA clocks the GeForce at 120MHz and the DDR SDRAM at 150MHz (yielding an effective clock rate of 300MHz). ELSA's engineers have streamlined their control panel, which makes selecting resolution and refresh rates easier than in the past. ELSA continues the trend of giving users as much control as possible over their graphics setup - right down to being able to enable or disable VSYNC in the control panel. The result is a control panel with more features but one that is much less cumbersome than past ELSA control panels. The card also has TV-out, through a Connexant video-encoder chip. The TV-out has all the limitations of similar products, such as limiting your display to 800x600x60Hz. The card ships with a game-sampler CD; the drivers are designed to work with ELSA's 3D Revelator LCD stereoscopic glasses. If you do get an Erazor, I strongly recommend picking up a set of Revelators too. These are the best LCD shutter glasses I've used. They're compatible with most Direct3D and OpenGL titles, and the effect can be quite startling. The drivers support a very high refresh rate (up to 200MHz at lower resolutions), which helps reduce eyestrain if you're using the Revelators. (Be wary about setting high refresh rates - make sure your monitor can support it.) The only real caveat is the price. At $299, it's fairly pricey. That puts it between the slightly more robust Hercules Prophet DDR (which has DVI support and a good software DVD player) and the Creative Annihilator Pro, which is more basic, but it also costs less. On the other hand, if you use your graphics hardware for more than just gaming, ELSA's reputation for stability and support may be a factor in your decision-making process. In the end, the Erazor X2 is a solid GeForce 256 DDR reference-board design with good controls, solid performance, and good stability. You could do a lot worse. Here's how we tested: The test bed was our standard AGP 4x test bed, which consists of an Intel 733MHz Penitum III, Asus P3C-E motherboard, 128MB of PC800 RDRAM, an IBM Deskstar 34GXP 20.5GB hard drive, and an IDE DVD-ROM drive. Software consisted of the seven GameGauge 2.5 titles, a clean installation of Windows 98SE, and DirectX 7.0a. The hard drive was defragged before the Content Creation Winstone test. Networking and audio were enabled during all testing. The TCP/IP stack had a hard-coded IP address to minimize DHCP effects. Only TCP/IP and IPX protocols were loaded. We typically install drivers supplied by the manufacturer on CD, unless the manufacturer indicates that a later driver revision is available on its web site. The CPU and memory bus are not overclocked. The graphics chip and memory are run at the manufacturer's default setting. The tests run are:
Appeal: GeForce 256 DDR board from a company with a reputation for stability Pros: Fast, stable, good control panel Cons: Somewhat pricey; just a bit slower than some of the competition By Loyd Case
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