| Our
install went flawless in a number of tests
systems here at the Hot Hardware
lab. We set up the Gladiac in both
an i820 based system and an old stand-by
BX chipset based motherboard. In
either case, the Gladiac gave us no
trouble whatsoever.
The drivers
provided by Elsa are based on the NVidia
reference drivers with a wrapper
customized by Elsa and a few extra
goodies.
click
images for full view
Again,
nothing too exotic here but Elsa does give
you the ability to overclock the Gladiac
right out of the box. In addition, 2D
image quality on our desktop was superb with
the Gladiac and the Elsa drivers.
As you
may know, the latest drivers from NVidia
officially support FSAA (Full Scene Anti-Aliasing)
in Direct 3D games. We decided we
wanted to see what a couple of games that
could really take advantage of FSAA, could
look like on a GeForce2.
Direct
3D FSAA With The GeForce2 GTS
click
'em
Things
look pretty smooth here for sure. This
shots were taken with the FSAA slider in the
Direct 3D control panel, set to maximum.
The image quality here, as you can see, in
general is excellent. We should point
out however that at this point, in 32 bit
color with FSAA on in both of these games,
frame rates were unacceptable. We took both of
these shots at 800X600 in 32 bit color and
neither game was what we would consider
"playable". In 16 bit color,
game play was a lot smoother at 800X600 and
1024X768. Regardless, in our opinion
NVidia still has some work to do with FSAA,
for it to be a viable feature with their
hardware.
 |
| Overclocking
The Gladiac |
| Sweetness |
|
As we
noted, the Gladiac does allow for overclocking
within its own set of drivers. With this
feature easily at hand, we couldn't help but
try our luck at higher core and memory
clocks. We are happy to report that the
Elsa Gladiac (at least the card we tested) had
plenty of margin in both Core and Memory Clock
Speeds. We were able to get our Gladiac
to run stable and with no visual artifacts, at
a core speed of 220MHz. and memory speed of
380MHz. DDR. In addition, the card was
totally stable with an overclocked AGP bus all
the way up to 100MHz. We set up our
Intel BX chipset board with a 100MHz. Front
Side Bus and a 1/1 setting for the AGP
divider. The Gladiac hung tough through
all of our testing at this setting.
Kudos to Elsa for designing a VERY stable
graphics card. In addition, the somewhat
"standard" heat sink and fan combo
that is on the Gladiac provides adequate but
not what we would call robust cooling and heat
transfer. With a larger heat sink
installed on the GeForce2 GTS chip, the
possibilities for even higher clock speeds are
very intriguing. In our final
assessment, overall we were very impressed by
the Gladiac with respect to overclocking and
the card's built in speed "margin". |
