• NVIDIA GeForce 256 at 120MHz
• 15M triangles/sec
• 480M pixels/sec fill rate
• 32MB 6ns Infineon DDR SGRAM @ 150MHz
• 8 hardware lights
• 350MHz RAMDAC
• AGP 1X/2X/4X Compliant w/Fast Writes
• 2D: 256-bit 2D acceleration, optimized pipeline for 16-, 24- and 32-bit color depths
• 3D: 256-bit engine with 4 independent rendering pipelines, hardware transform & lighting, cube environment bump mapping, projective textures, vertex blending, multi texturing, procedural texturing, table fog, stencil shadowing, texture compression, bilinear-, trilinear- and 8-tap-anisotropic texture filtering, MIP-mapping
• 32-bit Z-buffer/stencil
• Cube Environment Mapping
• Texture Compression
• DVD and HDTV-ready motion compensation for MPEG-2 decoding
• DVD sub-picture alpha blended composting
• 173 x 108 mm (ATX format, not including mounting bracket)
• VESA BIOS 3.0, DPMS, DDC2B, plug&play
• Video-out: S-Video
• Maximum Resolution of 2048 x 1536
• APIS: Direct3D, OpenGL, DirectDraw, DirectVideo, DirectX7
• WHQL-qualified drivers Optimized for Pentium III SSE™ and AMD 3D NOW™
• 6 year warranty

The ERAZOR X² has an impressive feature set.  Being based on the GeForce 256 you know it's going to have the most explosive 3D performance available today period.  Having DDR SGRAM makes it even more of a powerhouse.  The ERAZOR X² is based on the NVIDIA reference design and does come with a thin heatsink/fan combo which does work quite nicely and does not block any other expansion slots in your system.  Unfortunately, the heatsink is just glued on with no thermal paste.  Here is a front and back picture of the actual board we received:

The 350MHz RAMDAC gives you crystal clear images all the way up to 2048x1536 (if you're monitor can handle that resolution).  I've tried 1600x1200 on my Samsung 700IFT 17" monitor and it looks absolutely stunning.

As far as 3D features go, the GeForce 256 doesn't fall short.  You'll be hard pressed to find a feature the GeForce doesn't have or doesn't implement better than it's competitors.  The image quality of this board is astounding, it goes beyond the already excellent image quality of the TNT2 by providing almost "free" trilinear filtering which will get rid of those ugly steps in blurriness you sometimes in experience in 3D games, especially when looking at the floor of a First Person Shooter like Quake 3.  The GeForce also has Cube Environment Mapping which allows developers to map the environment to an object in a scene.  Here are a couple of screenshots so you can see what I mean:

Without Cube Environment Mapping

With Cube Environment Mapping

The other nice addition to the GeForce's feature set is the HDTV and DVD motion compensation built into the chip.  For HDTV (High Definition Television), the card will be able to support the 480i and 1080i MPEG2 streams, how exactly this will work is beyond me since I won't be getting HDTV for quite a while.  On the DVD side of things, NVIDIA has finally added motion compensation to the GeForce so that you don't need a super fast processor to get smooth 30 fps DVD playback.

Finally, the ERAZOR X² also has an S-Video out which uses the same Booktree 869 chip that TNT2 and Voodoo3 users are used to.  The chip is great for playing games and even watching DVD's on a TV but not so great for presentation type of work because of poor text quality and lack of sharpness.

Next Page: What's In The Box/Installation & Testing