ELSA Erazor X and Absolute Multimedia Outrageous 3D GeForce Review

The Features

You can take a peek at the various non-chipset related options chat below to see which card has what.

The prices of most of the cards are about the same when comparing to their respective memory type. The memories used are also very similar in speed and you will notice that 6 ns SGRAM is the memory of choice for the DDR boards. All but the Creative Labs and the Erazor X have video out capabilities while the O3D is the only board that is running reference drivers (which isn't necessarily bad). You'll notice two prices for the O3D as it has two versions. The OEM (cheaper) gives you one free piece of software (that you choose from a list) and the retail version that gives you three choices. There really isn't a whole lot of variety between all these cards aside from a few minor differences.

Athlon Issues

It was brought to my attention that there were still random issues between GeForce based products and Athlon systems. After receiving tons of emails from troubled Athlon/GeForce owners (mind you this wasn't with any particular brand but a variety), I decided to look into it myself on my home system where I play quite a bit of Quake Arena. I installed my new Athlon system at home and within 5 minutes of play, I froze. After a few hours of troubleshooting the driver revisions and tweaking the BIOS, I came up without an answer to the problem. I had even tried the latest NVIDIA reference drivers and nothing helped. This is very distressing to many people and my sympathy goes out to you. We will continue to look into this issue, interviewing AMD and NVIDIA on this rather annoying and somehow disheartening topic. The odd part about it is that not everyone is experiencing these issues. I personally doubt that those problems are a problem of the Athlon-processor, neither do I suspect any flaw in GeForce's design. My best guess is that we'll have to blame Athlon's chipset for those random lockups. The available Athlon platforms, which are still only based on AMD's rather 'old fashioned' 'Irongate' chipset are anyway by far the weakest spot of any Athlon-system. Thus the best solution for this issue might be new chipsets. VIA's upcoming KX133-chipset that will finally offer state-of-art AGP4x, PC133 and some more will hopefully proof to be free of any compatibility-issues and offer Athlon the platform it deserves. For now, I can only recommend that if you're an Athlon owner looking at buying a GeForce card like the ones here in our review, keep in mind you may run into some issues.

Driver Interface - Erazor X

Here we have a slightly altered version of your standard settings display property window. Access to a detailed monitor configuration property window is available by clicking details.

This window allows you to set your monitor configuration. Probably only good for advanced users.

Here we have the basic information window that provides driver information as well as other low level information about the card.

Here we have all the DirectX driver options we'll use and then some. Note that this driver lets you disable vsync in OpenGL without any additional tweaks.