The package comes with the following software:

• ELSA WINman Suite includes ELSA Driver Settings, ELSA Info, ELSA SmartRefresh, ELSA SmartResolution
• Drivers CD w/drivers for Windows 9X and NT 4.0
• English, German and French Manual in print; Italian and Spanish on CD only
• Corel Draw 7 and Corel PhotoPaint 7
• 3D demos CD
• video-editing software: ELSA MainActor
• software DVD player: ELSAmovie
• Drakan from Psygnosis (full version)

I would say that this is a pretty good software bundle.  From what I hear, Drakan is an excellent game and Corel Draw 7 and Photo-paint 7 are very worthy graphics programs.  Unfortunately, our sample did not come with any of this software other than the drivers so we cannot relay to you if they are worthy enough to be the deciding factor between buying this GeForce card and another.  You'll have to decide that for yourself.

Here are a couple screenshots of the ELSA driver software:

Click on any image for a full size view
This panel shows you all the details of the card such as type of RAM, size of RAM, driver revision, etc.	This panel is ELSA's TV-Out selection.  It is all automatic, so all you have to do is turn on your TV and click the checkbox
ELSA has put all D3D/OpenGL options in one nicely laid out window.	ELSA provides a great monitor tuning/selection utility which goes beyond that of most manufactures.
All of the above can be easily reached using ELSA's taskbar icon.  I like the fact that you can turn TV-Out on and off without going into the display properties.

Sadly, the only thing missing is a section or slider to overclock the card.

As I've mentioned on the main page of this review, changing the clock speed by1 MHz is like changing it by 2 MHz on a TNT2 because of the quad-pipeline rendering architecture.  Thus, the amount you will be able to overclock the card in terms of MHz will be a lot less than that of other cards like the TNT2 and Voodoo3. With that said, we went on to see just how far this card to go...

First off, I should mention and important finding we've discovered with the GeForce.  It has a much higher tolerance for higher AGP clock settings than the TNT2 did.  For example, the TNT2 would not run at all on a system with an AGP bus speed over 80 MHz.  The AGP bus speed is calculated by taking 100% of the system FSB or 2/3 of it.  On most motherboards you can actually select 1/1 or 2/3. So if you have a FSB of 100MHz, you're AGP bus can be 100MHz or 66MHz.  So, with TNT2 card, games would not load when I had my Celeron set to 95MHz x 6 = 570 or even 90MHz x 6 = 540.  It would lock up as soon as I started a game because the TNT2 could not handle a 90 or 95MHz AGP clock.  As soon as I put the ELSA ERAZOR X² , I was able to play games flawlessly at 570MHz (95MHz AGP and FSB bus).  So that is one plus side to having a GeForce over a TNT2 or TNT2 Ultra.

As far as overclocking the card itself, we were able to get some very nice numbers but nothing to extraordinary. We used the CoolBits=3 registry tweak in NVIDIA's 3.68 reference drivers to overclock the card.  The drivers reported that the default speed of the core was 120MHz and the RAM was 301MHz (150MHz DDR).  At a 66MHz AGP bus, we were able to overclock the card to 140MHz core and 340MHz RAM.  At the 95MHz FSB, we were able to get 128MHz core and 335MHz RAM.  Not too shabby.  If ELSA and other manufacturers would put some thermal compound between the heatsink and the chip, instead of gluing it on, maybe we could reach higher speeds.

Seeing as more and more people want to watch DVD's on their PC or output them to a televsion set (because of the lower cost of buying a DVD-ROM than a set-top box), NVIDIA has spiced up the DVD capabilities of the GeForce.  Along with that, they've added some support and some features for HDTV (High Definition Television) such as hardware motion compensation.

Since at this point in time we have no way of testing the HDTV components (since we don't have the equipment, nor the signal from our cable company), we'll take NVIDIA's word for it.  Besides, by the time HDTV really becomes mainstream, 5-10 years from now, you'll probably have a new video card.

DVD's on the other hand, are here now and most computer sold today come with DVD-ROM drives.  We tested the GeForce's motion compensation with a Pioneer DVD-103S (6X ATAPI) drive and compared it to the TNT2's playback. 

With our TNT2 card and a Celeron 570, CPU usage was around 90% and there were no skipped frames or slowdowns. On the ELSA ERAZOR X² , CPU usage on the same system hovered in the 60-70% range, so there is a noticeable improvement but still not as much as a dedicated hardware MPEG2 decoder card.  The image quality between the ERAZOR X²  and the TNT2 were very close with the GeForce only slightly coming out on top with a less visual artifacts.

Next Page: Performance Results & Analysis