Elsa Erasor X - The future of 3d graphics?
Written: Sep 07 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Fast, good software bundle, Graphics (when right) look superb. Thorough manuals.
Cons: Chip-guard problems, Shearing, Driver support shoddy for initial months of existance
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| robertopaul's Full Review: Elsa Erazor X |
I purchased this 3d graphics card around December 99 having read several reviews on places like Firingsquad.com and SharkyExtreme. Overall it seemed one of the best of the bunch. But like a lot of graphics cards, they can be extremely temperamental.
If at first you don't succeed...
I purchased the card from my local PC World for a relatively princely sum of £180 ($240). This included a 3D showcase game called Drakan, and a free copy of the excellent CorelDraw paint package.
The installation guide was well laid out and easy for the beginner to follow and the user manual was extremely detailed on the operation of Elsa's supporting software. Getting the software installed was fairly simple and relatively painless. One of the features of Elsa is a utility called chip-guard which monitors the graphics card and shuts you out if it becomes over-heated.
That's where the problem with it lay. At first things seemed to be ok. We tested the Drakan game, and Freespace and things at first appeared fine. Then suddenly the big red flashing warning message appeared saying 'Your graphics card has overheated' and that was it. It wouldn't let you continue with any other programs. I re-read the manual, made sure everything in the settings was correct, yet on reboots it would automatically pop-up with that error message.
I decided to take the card back to PC World so they could verify what I suspected - there was a fault on the graphics card. The technical person seemed suspicious that I knew a lot about what was potentially wrong (I explained how I had a degree in Computer Science, which I think made him more determined to see that it was *me* at fault...). He installed the card and software on his test machine, and told me everything looked ok. I politely asked if he could check what happened on reboot. Immediately when he had rebooted into Windows 98, the Elsa Chip guard warning came up, giving the technical support person a bit of a surprise.
PC World, to their credit, had no quibbles and offered me either a refund or a replacement. I decided to try again with the Elsa so chose to take home the replacement and go through the full install once more.
With the card working, I discovered that Elsa had limited the resolution to 1024*768, rather than what I had on my old cheap 2D card (1280*1024). I was extremely dissapointed with this, but a week later on their website they released an update to their drivers which fixed this problem.
Tearing and Shearing
However, that wasn't the end of the problems. It seemed that on many games, although they looked fast and graphically rich, there was a major problem with shearing or stuttery tearing. In particular it was noticeable on games that used the OpenGL software like Quake3.
I downloaded the latest drivers which seemed to fix some of the tearing in DirectX based games (like Unreal Tournament), although Quake 3 was an embarrassment to play. I also tried the standard NVidia drivers but these were no better really. Only after 4 months or so and various driver upgrades from Elsa, did they seem to manage to support OpenGL to an extent were games weren't tearing apart as you played them.
DirectX games on the other hand are now excellent to play, with rich detailed 32-bit colour, and no stuttering in 3-d environments (even on my machine which is a P3-450).
8 months since I purchased the card, and although the problems existed in the beginning, I feel that Elsa eventually managed to get the drivers sorted out. Graphically, and in terms of speed, Elsa is indeed top drawer (when it wasn't shearing/tearing).
Another positive feature of the package was the Elsa Display software provided a vast array of options, catering for the beginner (who may want to simply change resolution), to the advanced user ( who might want to fiddle with advanced DirectX/OpenGL options).
Decent, but not Great
Overall, I would recommend this card to those who have the patience to tweak options, and to be able to cope with changing drivers (i.e. using Elsa or Nvidia reference drivers). The manuals are a god-send because they take time to explain the software and installation process. For absolute beginners, I would advise researching 3d graphic cards a bit more, before choosing to go with Elsa - I imagine if a beginner had experienced the initial problems I had with the card, they may have simply given up...
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 240 (Now probably around 150!)
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Epinions.com ID:
robertopaul
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Reviews written: 38
Trusted by: 29 members
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