The Elsa Gladiac
Based on the NVidia GeForce2 GTS With 32MB DDR SDRAM

By Dave "Davo" Altavilla
6/4/00

 

Graphics Card reviews are probably the most regularly covered material that we produce here at Hot Hardware.  Perhaps that is because there is an almost dizzying array of manufacturers to choose from.  Regardless, Elsa has been known in the market for quite some time as a quality Graphics Card vendor with years of experience (15+ to be specific) in design and manufacturing.  In addition, keeping pace with 3D graphics technology, Elsa releases products with every 6 month new release that the graphics chipset giant NVidia, can dish out.  This is our take on Elsa's latest NVidia driven Gladiac.  Powered by the new GeForce2 GTS and 32MB of DDR SDRAM, the Gladiac is targeted at the "Hard Core Gamer".  Let's see if it has the guts to keep up.
  

Specifications & Features Of The Gladiac
A straight forward reference design not built by Elsa, so it seems.

  • Graphics Controller: NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS GPU
    • 200MHz. Core Clock Speed
    • Integrated Transforms and Lighting
    • Per pixel shading and dual texturing
    • Full Scene hardware anti-aliasing, multi-texturing, procedural texturing
    • Environmental mapping, bump mapping, shadow stenciling
    • Bilinear, Trilinear and 8-tap anistropic texture filtering
    • 1.6 GigaTexels per second
  • RAMDAC/Pixel Cycle: 350 MHz
  • Memory: 32MB or 64MB DDR RAM - 333MHz. DDR
  • Bus Systems: AGP 2x/4x
  • Standards: DPMS, DDC2B, Plug & Play
  • Optional Video Module: 1x Video-In & 1x Video-Out
  • BIOS: VESA BIOS 3.0 support
  • API Support: DirectX 6, DirectX 7, OpenGL
  • Internal/Memory Interface Clock: 200MHz/166MHz
  • Horizontal SYNC Signals: 31.5Hz - 108.5Hz
  • Vertical Refresh Rate: 60Hz - 200Hz
  • Software drivers for Windows 95 & 98, Windows 2000, Windows NT 4.0
  • Optional GLADIAC video-in and video-out module available on
  • 6 year service warranty

What we have here is a very straight forward reference design.  Elsa used Infineon 6ns DDR SGRAM on this board.  There are connectors adjacent to the GeForce2 chip that will let you install a TV In / TV Out daughter card.  The heat sink and fan combo are also fairly standard issue hardware.

On the other hand, I was surprised to see that the Gladiac had almost no sign of the fact that it was an Elsa product.  We received what was clearly a retail ready package yet, the product itself was very "generic" looking.  The fan has a sticker on it from the actual OEM vendor of the fan itself.  After a little investigation we were able to find out the VisionTek is actually private labeling at least the first round of boards for Elsa.  You'll notice on the VisionTek site, that they offer "OEM Contract Manufacturing" services.  Many OEMs are working with this model these days.  Design the hardware and software and have the circuit board outsourced to a "board stuffer" for production, final assembly, test and deployment.  This is a very cost efficient way of bringing a product to market.  It allows for dollars to be spent on R&D versus costly capital equipment for required added manufacturing capacity.  In addition, Elsa can also up or down scale production builds easily with the ebb and flow of market demand, without having wasteful empty line capacity or shortages.  We think this is a good strategy in today's very competitive Graphics Card market.

But enough of the Economics and Manufacturing lesson, you came to see what kind of 3D Thrills this new beast can bring to your PC.  Well then, it is set up time.

Setup, Installation and FSAA