More rarely than often in the PC industry we see a hardware manufacturer stand out because of their admirable dedication to quality instead of focusing on the bottom line of how cheaply they can make a generic product.  Their products usually reflect an added price premium that in turn reflects the old axiom “you get what you pay for.” 

In the gaming graphics card industry finding a company that stands out from the rest other than in what handful of games they bundle with their card is quite difficult.  With most manufacturers simply following a reference design set forth by the chipset manufacturer, it’s indeed very rare to see a company stand out among the competition.

ELSA is a company that does fall into that rare category of card manufacturers with a distinct look, not because they have some new-born philosophy of setting themselves apart from the crowd, but because they’ve concentrated on quality in manufacturing from the start back in the early 1980s. 

Originally ELSA was never a user that tailored to the needs of the home-user, much less the gaming population, their roots were in the workstation market.  What the workstation market teaches you, as a company, is that being cost effective comes second to offering the best in quality (especially with drivers).  Unfortunately the exact opposite is sometimes true in the home-user market, but from ELSA’s standpoint, they had been taught to go about manufacturing products to the best of their ability from their workstation background and weren’t about to change their philosophy upon making an entry into the home-user market. 

Although the German company may not be familiar to those that haven’t followed ELSA’s products in the workstation market, they are farm from a newcomer to the industry.  In fact, NVIDIA’s faith in ELSA’s history landed ELSA the exclusive deal to producing boards based on NVIDIA’s workstation-level Quadro chipset, a part whose success is largely dependent on driver support much greater than what NVIDIA is prepared to offer with their Detonator driver updates. 

Along with being the only company to produce a Quadro board, ELSA has been working very close with NVIDIA and is going to be among the second wave of card manufacturers to produce cards based on NVIDIA’s gaming level flagship, the GeForce 256, but outfitted with Double Data Rate SGRAM.  Their first GeForce product was the recently released Erazor X which featured 166MHz SDRAM (conventionally referred to as Single Data Rate or SDR SDRAM in order to differentiate between regular and DDR SGRAM), but with the accelerated shipping of DDR GeForce boards by the competitors ELSA has gone ahead and released the Erazor X’s DDR counterpart, the Erazor X². 

Boasting a 150MHz DDR memory clock (150MHz x 2 = 300MHz effective clock), the Erazor X² is the first retail DDR based GeForce card that we are taking a look at. 

The Specs

• NVIDIA GeForce 256 @ 120MHz
• 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
• AGP 2X/4X Compliant
• 32MB DDR SGRAM @ 150MHz
• Maximum Resolution of 2048 x 1536
• S-Video Output
• ELSA SmartRefresh and ELSA SmartResolution provide optimal monitor settings
• Software Bundle: Drakan from Psygnosis (full version), Corel Draw 7 and Corel PhotoPaint 7 (on the CorelSelect OEM CD), 3D demos CD, video-editing software ELSA MainActor, ELSAmovie (software DVD player) and the ERAZOR X CD with drivers and utilities
  

The Card

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Unlike ELSA’s ERAZOR X board which uses regular (or SDR) SDRAM, the ERAZOR X² isn’t based on ELSA’s own PCB design, instead it’s based on the DDR GeForce reference design provided by NVIDIA.  The reason for this seems to be that the release of their DDR product was rushed by the fact that Creative Labs and Guillemot had pushed for the release and sale of their DDR products before the end of last year.  In order to remain competitive ELSA didn’t worry about using their own design and simply produced a reference DDR GeForce with their name on it. 

Unfortunately, for ELSA’s sake, this means that the ERAZOR X² will have much difficulty separating itself from the rest of the DDR GeForce products out there, most of which happen to be based on NVIDIA’s reference design. 

The card makes use of a total of eight 4MB DDR SGRAM chips manufactured by Infineon.  The 6ns Infineon chips should be capable, theoretically, of operating at 166MHz which, because of them being DDR chips, would result in a transfer rate equal to that of 333MHz chips.  In spite of this the memory clock is still rated at a moderate 150MHz most likely as a safe guard in case Infineon becomes incapable of delivering faster chips in the future. 

Currently Infineon is the only manufacturer that produces DDR SGRAM for DDR GeForce boards however as Samsung and others ramp up production on their DDR SDRAM and DDR SGRAM parts we will see the variety in DDR chips used on GeForce boards increase.  For now, you can almost be 100% certain that your ERAZOR X² will be used with 6ns Infineon DDR SGRAM which opens up a few overclocking options to push the 150MHz default setting even higher. 

The heatsink/fan combo on the ERAZOR X² is the same combo we’ve seen on all of the reference cards from NVIDIA, which is explained by the fact that the X² is just a reference design DDR board.  The heatsink is mounted directly onto the GeForce chip without the use of any thermal compound.  This is a mistake that most manufacturers make simply because, on an assembly line, it’s difficult to apply the right amount of thermal compound to a part and for most users, where overclocking isn’t a major concern, there is no need for the added thermal compound to improve thermal conductivity and thus allow the heatsink to dissipate more heat.  The only manufacturer that took the time to apply thermal compound to the chips on their cards was the late Hercules, manufacturer of the Dynamite TNT2 and TNT2 Ultra, two of the highest clocked TNT2 cards on the market. 

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The board features an S-Video output port that is driven by the Brooktree 869KRF chip that we’re already quite familiar with.  The Brooktree chip was present on most TNT2 boards and supports the following resolutions: 640 x 480, 800 x 600, and 1024 x 768.  As we discovered in our roundup of four of the top TV-Output solutions, the 869 chip performed best at displaying vivid images on a TV screen in a bright and colorful manner, which makes it perfect for a gaming card.  Unfortunately the chip’s text output is considerably blurrier than the output from Matrox’s Graphics’ TVO which is present on the Millennium G400 series of cards.  The latter shouldn’t be that big of an issue since this is a gamer’s card, but just be warned of it if you plan on doing extensive word processing using the TV out function on the ERAZOR X². 

The 2D output of the ERAZOR X² is driven by the 350MHz RAMDAC integrated into the GeForce chip itself. 

As the analog signal is outputted from the frame buffer to the VGA output on the card for display on your monitor, the quality of the signal can be degraded as a result of poor quality filters present between the frame buffer and the VGA output connector.  The sacrifice for poor quality filters is normally made in order to lower the end costs of the video card itself.  This ends up causing blurred text at higher resolutions as well as a fuzzy display among other symptoms.  While the issues aren’t evident at lower resolutions (1280 x 1024 and below), they are very noticeable for users that run at above 1280 x 1024. 

Luckily, with ELSA, these problems aren’t evident as the 2D output of the ERAZOR X² was very crisp.  This helps reinforce ELSA’s philosophy of quality being job #1 and cost falling a close second. 

Unlike their ERAZOR X drivers, the ERAZOR X² drivers did not come with an overclocking utility which forced us to use Power Strip to attempt to overclock the card.  As with all overclocking, the standard disclaimer, your mileage may vary, must be issued.  In the case of the ERAZOR X², you’re going to be hoping that your mileage does in fact vary as we were only able to increase the core clock speed of the GeForce to 130MHz from the 120MHz default setting. 

While the chip was able to reach 135MHz core, the test system would lock up under Quake III Arena after a few loops of any demo.  This indicates that the problem was most likely a heat related issue, adding a bit of thermal compound or a superior heatsink/fan could help achieve this speed. 

At 130MHz, the performance gains are minimal.  While this does increase the peak fill rate of the GeForce from 480 Mpixel/s to 520 Mpixel/s, it doesn’t make that big of a difference in real world gaming performance.

As we mentioned earlier the card featured 6ns DDR SGRAM memory manufactured by Infineon.  The 6ns rating would ideally allow for clock speeds up to 166MHz, which when operating in DDR mode would produce an effective transfer rate equal to that of 333MHz SGRAM.

The 166MHz setting was the highest we were able to push the 6ns Infineon DDR SGRAM to which was pretty much expected.  The performance improvement was noticeable but not tremendous but since it came without the sacrifice of stability you can consider it to be something for nothing. 

Drivers

ELSA's driver utility bundled with the ERAZOR X2 is pretty impressive. Some of the most useful features include V-Sync control for both Direct3D and OpenGL and manual refresh rate adjustment in 1Hz increments.

The Test

Driver issues keep the ERAZOR X2 from coming out on top at 640 x 480 where driver limitations can be clearly seen by the performance scores. Since we used the 3.53 drivers from NVIDIA to remain consistent, this issue shouldn't be reserved to the ERAZOR X2 but all reference DDR GeForce designs.

This isn't a big deal in the first place since there isn't a single user that will be running their DDR GeForce at 640 x 480 x 16-bit color.

Here we see the true benefits of the DDR SGRAM in the 32-bit color performance of Quake III Arena.

Unreal Tournament gains nothing from the overclocked settings, but the ERAZOR X2 still comes out on top.

Conclusion

Sometimes making the final decision about any product is a very difficult one, in other cases, it couldn’t be easier.  The latter is about the level of difficulty we’ll have with pretty much all of the DDR GeForce boards on the market, since they’re all pretty much the same (they all closely resemble the same reference design).

The ERAZOR X² comes with ELSA’s trademark 6 year warranty which may or may not tilt the balance of the card in your buying favor, it also comes with a fairly unique software bundle.  Including OEM versions of CorelDraw 7 and CorelPhotoPaint 7 adds some value to the card itself, but for the most part, when purchasing a DDR GeForce board you should be attracted to its cost as the most important feature. 

With DDR SGRAM already running fairly high in price, expect to pay an added premium of $50 - $100 more than the SDR ERAZOR X for the X² version.  One thing the ERAZOR X² does guarantee you, as a result of ELSA’s attention to quality, is crisp 2D output at 1600 x 1200 which is often times very important to those users with larger monitors. 

All in all the ERAZOR X² isn’t a bad card, if you’re in the market for a DDR GeForce it’s a perfect candidate, but it won’t be the cheapest and is unfortunately a little harder to find in North America when compared to competing DDR products from Creative Labs and Hercules.