Elsa Erazor II TNT 16Mb AGP

Wednesday, June 02, 1999

Introduction

Based on the Nvidia Riva TNT graphic engine, the Elsa ERAZOR II is another of the many products offered by Elsa. Founded in 1980, Elsa offers complete 2D and 3D solutions for home entertainment and game users. The Elsa Erazor II is a 2D/3D graphic accelerator propelled by the raw power of the NVIDIA RIVA TNT (TwiN-Texel) 128-bit 3D processor. Fully supporting Direct3D as well as OpenGL, the Erazor II is capable of single pass multi-texture processing with about 180 million pixels-per-second of fill rate.

The unit I received for testing is not the retail version but the OEM version and for this reason it is not equipped with a fan and a heatsink assembly as the retail version it but instead of it comes with a plain heatsink./FONT>



       

The software bundle

The software bundle coming with this graphic card seems to be the same than the Erazor II version as both drivers as well as drivers for several other Elsa graphic cards are included on this CD. Other than the drivers, the applications included on this CD, are: Microsoft DirectX 6, Elsa Winman suite, Microsoft Media Payer, Intel Indeo 5 nmedia player and an offline Elsa WWW browser. There is also a directory on the CD named Elsaware where you can find and install several other application demo such as: 3DMax2, Autocad 13 and 14, Allplan, DosTools, Elsa View 3D for Win NT, Guardian, LogoCad and many other various applications to name only these ones. An Acrobat version of the users manual can also be found as well as the Acrobat Reader of course.

By the way, the Elsa Winman suite is a very useful feature allowing you to access all of your Erazor II settings as well as any of your display settings. It also gives a lot of information for various parameters of your system.

As a fact, this is by far the most complete system information and settings tweaking application I saw to date and the only feature missing in my opinion is a function to allow the tweaking of the graphic card clock and memory operating frequency.



The performances

All tests were performed with the following system setup:

Motherboard: Abit BX6 revision 2.0
CPU: Intel Pentium II 350mhz
Memory: 64mb PC100 SDram (LGS)
IDE first channel Primary port: Wester Digital 4.3gig UDMA66
IDE second channel Primary port: Kenwood 52X True X
AGP slot: Elsa Erazor II TNT 16Mb SDRAM AGP
ISA slot number 2: Ensoniq Soundscape soundcard
ISA slot number 1: US Robotic 56k X2 modem
OS: Win98 4.10
DirectX 6.0

Note: The Abit Soft Menu II Turbo mode was enabled for all tests.

All tests were performed with the VSYNC disabled unless otherwise specified.


The 2D results

Wintune97 Results


The result displayed here is a bit better than the Diamond Viper V550 which reached the highest score (165) observed to date on this benchmark.



Winbench99 Business Graphic Winmark

As we can se here, the Erazor II graphic card is not very far from the ATI Rage Fury scores.



The 3D results

Forsaken + Intel PII-350mhz
Graphic card 640 X 480 - 75hz 16-bit 800 X 600 - 75hz 16-bit
Viper V550 16Mb AGP 150.32 fps 119.40 fps
Elsa Erazor 16Mb AGP 127.14 fps 117.68 fps

The Forsaken FPS tests were performed 3 times each and the mean value obtained is the one indicated in the above results. While playing the Forsaken demo, the Erazor does not even come close to the performance of the Viper V550 on the 640 X 480 sreen mode but it is almost on par when the demo is played by using the 800 X 600 mode.


Quake 2 + Intel PII-350mhz using 800 X 600 X 75hz 16-bit
Graphic card Demo 2 Crusher.dm2
Diamond Viper V550 16Mb AGP 54.63 fps not tested
ATI Rage Fury 128 GL 32Mb AGP 55.30 fps not tested
Elsa Erazor II 16Mb AGP 54.83 fps 32.16 fps

Once again, the Elsa Erazor II scored pretty close to the other grapic cards tested as we can see in the above Quake 2 Timedeo tests results.


Quake 2 + Intel PII-350mhz using 800 X 600 X 75hz 32-bit
Graphic card Demo 2 Crusher.dm2
ATI Rage Fury 128 GL 32Mb AGP 54.8 fps not tested
Elsa Erazor II 16Mb AGP 39.83 fps 29.90 fps

When using the 32-bit color mode, the Erazor II has a performance drop much more noticeable than the ATI Rage Fury as we can see on the above test results.

Timedemo testing procedure used:

  • The computer has been freshly booted
  • Quake 2 (3.20) has been launched
  • The video console has been opened
  • The appropriate screen resolution has been selected
  • The game console as been opened by typing " ~ "
  • Once in the console I typed "Timedemo 1" and "Enter"
  • The command "demomap demo2.dm2" has been typed
  • Once the demo was finished, I used to quit the game
  • TComputer is rebooted for the next test.

    Unreal


    Unfortunately, it has been impossible to run Unreal with this graphic card because the original Unreal CD doesn't have any support for OpenGL and Direct 3D. So, I used to download patch 220 to update my version of Unreal and add support for OpenGL and Direct 3D but for some reasons I don't understand, the patching process can't complete and gives me an error message saying that I need to free up more space on my C: drive while I already have 615Mb available... So, if by chance, somebody reading this articles knows why I am having this problems to install Unreal patch 220, please let me know and if I can do it successfully, I will update this review with the results obtained.



    Final Reality


    The above values are the mean values obtained from 5 tests ran in a row by selecting the Advanced Benchmark option of Final Reality. I'm a bit deceived by the Final Reality tests because I thought that they would be much higher than this but remember that the Velocity 4400 TNT has reached 4.19 on this same benchmark...



    3D Mark 99


    To give you an idea of how good is the score of the Erazor II let's remember that the ATI Rage Fury got 3254 of this benchmark. However, bear in mind that the Erazor II is installed on the Abit BX6 motherboard with the Turbo function enabled. Therefore, the real score is probably a bit lower than this but not very far.



    Conclusions

    The Erazor II Nvidia Riva TNT based graphic card appears to be avery good graphic card. It doesn't always outperform all the other graphic cards it has been compared to but it is not lagging very far behind. Besides, Elsa manufacturing quality reputation is not to be discussed anymore as it is a well recognized fact. Just look at the warranty and support offered with this graphic card is convincing enough. All in all, the Elsa Erazor II is an excellent TNT based graphic card as we can see in the above tests results.


    Please visit Elsa's Web site for more information.


    TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS
    Bus System: PCI or AGP
    Bus mastering DMA 2X 66MHz AGP Interface with full sideband support and a PCI 2.1 interface
    Graphics Controller: NVIDIA TNT
    Display Memory: 8 MB or 16 MB
    Memory: Graphics memory and system RAM, on-board texture cache
    Pixel Clock: up to 250 MHz
    Other Standards: VESA BIOS 2.0, DPMS, DDC2B, Plug and Play, ITU/CCIR-656 compatible video port VBE 2.0/3.0 supported
    Dimensions: 146 mm x 107 mm (not including the mounting bracket)
    Minimum System Requirement: Intel Pentium® 133 or compatible CPU, 16MB RAM, PCI 2.1 compliant motherboard or AGP
    Recommended System: Intel Pentium 166 or compatible CPU, 16MB RAM, PCI 2.1 compliant motherboard
    SOFTWARE SUPPORT
    • Windows® 95 & Windows® 98 Windows NT 3.5, 4.0 and 5.0 display drivers OpenGL® (Installable-client driver)
    • DirectDraw™ Direct 3D™, DirectVideo, ActiveX, DirectX and PC98 compatible
    • Software MPEG, Software DVD Windows 3.x display drivers
      OpenGL ICD for Windows 95 and Windows NT
      (passes compliance tests)
    • Designed to WHQL compatibility standards

    WARRANTY & SUPPORT
    • The ELSA ERAZOR II is backed by a 6 year warranty.
    • Technical support five days a week by phone.
    • FAQs at www.elsa.com in the Support section.

    GRAPHICS MODES
    ELSA ERAZOR II supports the following screen resolutions, color depths and refresh rates: