Summary

$450+ is a huge amount of money, even for an excellent graphics board like the Gladiac Ultra. One advantage this card has over its competitors are the included 3D Revelator Stereo-glasses, which make the Gladiac Ultra a rather exclusive choice.

We could not spot any performance difference between NVIDIA's reference board and the Gladiac Ultra. So far, all released graphics boards with the GeForce 2 Ultra are based on this reference design. Hence it doesn't make sense to pick a certain model because of its performance.

The only hardware difference between the different GF2 Ultra cards will be the memory speed and of course the presence or absence of a video-out port. According to NVIDIA's specs, the memory is clocked at 460 MHz (230 MHz DDR), which can be realized with 4.4 ns memory chips. Elsa uses even faster 4 ns chips, which goes up to 500 MHz (250 MHz DDR). I doubt that many companies will utilize those fast chips, as they are still very expensive. If you get your hands on such a board, you can be sure to have some margin left for overclocking.

Due to NVIDIA's elite chip, the Elsa Gladiac Ultra belongs to the upper class in any event. The long warranty time of 6 years and the 3D glasses are a basis to differentiate between the competition. It's hard to say how many potential buyers will truly be interested in the 3D glasses however. I tend to call the Gladiac Ultra one of the most impressive status symbols in terms of 3D graphics.