Part Three: First Impressions & Board Design

The packaging of these Elsa products was up to their usual high standards and everything was shipped in these attractive boxes very securely. The main graphic is typical of a graphics card related image yet remains striking and doesn't meander down the 'tacky avenue' that some manufactures chose to take.

As you can see from the clickable picture above the boxes vary very slightly with the PCI card's box opting to adopt the red tint to the main image. Lets move on to the main design of the boards to see what design discions Elsa have taken in this vital area.

We begin by looking at the AGP 64meg version. Here we can see the arrangement of the memory chips. Overclockers will be particularly pleased as Elsa follows the reference board closely and arranges the chips on one side of the board allowing for any heatsinks you wish add. There is even room for the wonderful watercooling modifications we have seen to Nvidia based cards in the past, although this may be overkill on a card of this nature. Our review board shipped with 7ns Hyundai chips, the type utilized by many Nvidia and ATI cards thus ensuring quality. Powerstrip read the default memory speed as 171mhz, a very healthy speed indeed. (I can remember when MX cards shipped with a 140mhz speed) It seems as memory is so inexpensive at present, Elsa have included the greatest quality memory they can, within the confines of the MX's architecture. We will see later in the review how well these chips will overclock.

Moving on to the heatsink we can see Elsa have included quite a healthily sized one. The black metal was finished with the utmost care and provided extremely effective cooling indeed. (Again, I can remember when it was hard to find an MX with a good HS.) Overclockers will be pleased at the overclocking potential the core has straight from the box but it is relatively easy to remove the heatsink and replace it with a 'Blue Orb' HSF. This will increase the core's oveclock by a considerable margin if you need to gain every last bit of performance from this card. On a more negative note, the heatsink was not attached with the pins that we see on some versions (but strangely the PCI version's was) and thus a little gentle DIY is required to remove it. However this in truth a minor fault and the modification should be fairly easy if you plan on doing this to your Elsa cards. The core was clocked at another healthy figure of 199mhz.

Here we can clearly see the back of the card, again fairly standard design choice here, the VGA input placed according to Nvidia's reference board. It's always nice to see the inclusion of the Tv-out port though, particularly as these are the budget graphics solutions at present.

Overall the 64meg AGP Gladiac was presented in nothing short of a stunning fashion. Everything looks neat and very well finished. If I could base awards on looks alone, Elsa would have a sure-fire winner on their hands, but as we know, it's the benchmarks that will speak louder than looks.

 

Part Four: The Retail Pack (AGP Version)

We have seen the box and the board but else can Elsa provide to tempt you to open your wallets? Here is what comes boxed with the card itself.

1x Elsa user manual.

1x Driver and Tools Compact Disk (includes Elsa's DVD 2000, Elsa branded drivers)

2x OEM Game Compact Disk (Ultima Online, Rage Rally 2000)

1x TV-out Connection Cable

(And the board itself)

That's the purely visual description of the AGP version, lets move on to what you will receive if you don't have a free AGP slot at present...

 

Page Three: Introducing The PCI Gladiac

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