If you read our review of ELSA's Erazor
II, my opening comments were that ELSA was not very well known in the
consumer market. They had done very well in the professional
workstation market but had just jumped in the mainstream consumer market
with new graphics cards based on the banshee and TNT among others.
Well in just a few months, they have become a major competitor to
companies like Diamond, Creative Labs, Guillemot to name a few.
ELSA's top quality boards and their innovations (such has the ELSA
3D Revelator's) have caused them to earn a well respected seat in
the consumer graphics card market. In this review, we'll be taking
a look at the eagerly awaited card.
This card is based on NVidia's Riva TNT2
chipset (not Ultra) and is clocked at NVidia's recommend speed of 125MHz
core and 150MHz RAM speed. ELSA has several versions of the card
available. They have the basic 16MB & 32MB models, they have a
32MB model with ViVo (Video In and Video Out) functions and finally they
have a package that includes the 32MB with ViVo and the ELSA
3D Revelator LCD glasses. If you're curious about what the 3D Revelator's
are or how well they work, then check out our review here.
The model supplied to us by ELSA is just your plain 32MB model without
the ViVo, we would have really like to test out the ViVo model, but
according to a rep at ELSA, they aren't ready yet.
In case you're not to familiar with the
TNT2 chip from NVidia, I've ripped this section from our Leadtek S320 II
review because it was written so well :) In a sense, the TNT2 is really what
NVidia expected the original TNT to be. The original TNT was
supposed to be based on the 0.25 micron process and run at 125MHz
killing the Voodoo2 at that time. However, it is very well known
that Nvidia was unable to
keep their promise. The chip had to be manufactured on the 0.35
micron process which rendered it incapable of running at speeds over 90MHz
without special cooling.
So at this point in time, NVidia has
finally changed over to the 0.25 micron process and those 125MHz+ chips
have become a reality. The TNT2 comes in two flavors, the regular
TNT2 and the TNT2 Ultra. They are really the same chip but because
manufacturing processes and silicon wafer qualities can vary, some chips
will be able to reach higher clock speeds than others. NVidia
tests for these chips, filters them out and sells them to board
manufacturers at a higher price because they can run at a higher
frequency. The TNT2's default clock speed is 125MHz while the TNT2
Ultra's default is 150MHz.
Nvidia has also stated that a few minor
modifications have been made to the TNT2's rendering pipeline which makes
it 5-10% faster at the same clock speed as TNT. Also, Nvidia says
32-bit performance has been improved significantly. DVD playback
has also been slightly improved to provide less dropped frames.
The TNT has some problems with poor DVD performance, especially on
lower end systems. Other than that, the TNT2's features are pretty much
the same as the TNT which already has a pretty complete 3D feature
list. The only thing I think is missing is bump mapping like
Matrox's G400. Anyway, let's proceed and take a look at the
complete feature list of the ELSA ERAZOR III.
