ELSA Gladiac MX Review – THG.RU

Introduction

Just about a month ago we brought you the NVIDIA GeForce2 MX review that promised to bring some serious pain to the competition of NVIDIA. Unlike its competition, this budget-conscience consumer graphics solution boasted true 3D performance, hardware T&L and optional video functionality, all for an affordable price.

ELSA was quick to pick up on this opportunity and did a speedy delivery as they bring us the Gladiac MX that is based on the GeForce2 MX chipset. With product in hand, we’re finally able to compare the “real deal” to the competition instead of using the theoretical configuration, pricing and performance that the engineering sample provided us with.

We’ve gathered the competition that’s moved into this market segment with all the recent changes going on, from the failure of the S3 Savage 2000 (bringing it from high end to low) and the release of the ATi Radeon (bringing the ATi Rage Fury MAXX down in price).

We’ll see how the MX does against its older, similarly priced siblings as well so that you have as many options as possible. I realize that consumers in this part of the market can be very careful when it comes down to the actual purchase because not everyone has the pocketbook of Bill Gates.

ELSA Gladiac MX

If you’ve read the GeForce2 MX (GF2 MX) review, you’ll remember that the GF2 MX chipset is capable of being shipping in a wide variety of flavors from memory configurations to various video support options. The Gladiac MX, hardware-wise, is basically the same configuration as the reference design. The board has 32MBs of SDRAM memory using a 128-bit interface. Video options on this board have been left to an optional video-in/video-out (or VIVO) module that will be available by the time this product is on store shelves for about $32. I was a little surprised not to see TwinView available on this product but that must’ve been a tradeoff that ELSA made to keep initial pricing down (more on this idea below). The software bundle consists of the driver, utilities, Software DVD player and ELSA’s Best Select software option. Best Select offers ELSA customers’ select game titles at an ultra-low price. The selection is rather small but it has a few decent choices as long as you don’t already have those titles. This might be appealing to some, as they want to get as much as they can for the price.

The one odd thing with the Gladiac MX was that I had expected the pricing for such a configuration to be about $149 at first and then drop slightly after a few weeks on the market. The board in actuality will sell for $179 initially and I’m sure prices will drop after a few weeks on the market. I asked ELSA about these higher than expected costs and the official response was that there were added costs to being first to market with the product. I wonder how long their sales will suffer until they drop the price. Not many people are going to impulse buy on such a product when they can wait a few weeks and pay much less for the Gladiac or a competitor based on the GF2 MX.

ELSA’s VIVO Module

As I mentioned earlier, ELSA will be shipping the VIVO add-on for their Gladiac series of cards and the part should retail for about $32. The other interesting thing about this upgrade is that it comes with quite a few items to make sure you’re able to make the upgrade. The kit will include the following:

• VIVO Module
• ESD strap
• Screwdriver
• Video editing software
• Video card bracket

As you can see from the above list, ELSA wants to make sure everyone is able to upgrade by supplying everything you’ll possibly need to upgrade your Gladiac GF2/MX. The only other detail I have on this add-on is that the video chip will be based on a Phillips chip.

Driver Interface

ELSA had shipped me an early sample of the Gladiac MX and with it was bundled drivers that did not install correctly so reference drivers were used. The interface from ELSA won’t change much from the Gladiac so feel free to check it out here. As you can see ELSA covers most of the basics when it comes to options available. I’m pretty happy with what is supplied and if anyone needs more than that, they’ll probably end up using a utility called Powerstrip.

The Competition

To meet the requirements of ‘competitor’ the given card had to be priced at less than $200 and have performance that would be within reason of the GF2 MX chipset. The final selections were the following: ATi Rage Fury MAXX, NVIDIA GeForce SDR/DDR and the S3 Savage 2000. Each of these boards is available on the market right now and the prices vary, as will the performance. Specific board configurations were used to keep the pricing down in this comparison. I’ve created a table for you to quickly compare some of each board’s basic offerings.

There are a few interesting notes to make here. First, you’ll notice that the Ati Rage Fury MAXX is one damn cheap card for having 64MB of memory and two core chips. This is mainly due to the fact that ATi is probably just making way for the Radeon series. The only DDR based board in the group ended up being the most expensive for obvious reasons. Almost all of our cards have hardware T&L and although S3 implementation isn’t as good as the GeForce/2 series, it has it nonetheless. Video options are rather rare in this group due to the added costs involved in supporting such an option. The Gladiac has video-in/out for about $32 more and the S2000 come standard with video-out. All of the competitors come standard with some type of software DVD player in case you have a DVD drive. The final comparison is the pricing within this group. The Gladiac should be more competitive here as its closer to the price of the GeForce DDR and that’s a bad thing. S3 appears to be begging people to take the S2000 as their best product is selling for s lower cost than most of our other solutions.

Some upcoming competition in this market segment will be from ATi, who hasn’t fallen asleep on the job. They’ve managed to put together a low cost answer to the MX chipset based on the Radeon core. This little powerhouse is to be released in the near future at the cost of about $200 and the performance 15% shy of the Radeon, claims ATi. We’ll have to wait and see for ourselves.

Test Setup

I planned on removing lower resolutions from our testing but with the performance caliber of these cards, it was important not to remove them as the performance varied greatly at 640×480 and 800×600 pixel resolutions.

It turned out that my S2000 board didn’t care to work with our test platform so after hours of wasted time trying to get it to running, it was removed from the testing. I have had nothing but major hassles with this board in the past when testing on the various platforms. It’s unfortunate that we have already lost a competitor but I’m much happier weeding out a troublesome board instead of having you do it at the cost of your hard earned money.

Performance Expectations

With this group of cards, I expect the GeForce DDR to be in the lead most of the time thanks to the mature drivers and serious memory bandwidth advantage. After that it should be rather close between the GeForce SDR and the Gladiac MX. I feel the Gladiac MX will do well until resolutions and color depths rise beyond what the memory can handle.

Test Results – Quake 3 Arena

The GeForce DDR is clearly our winner in this test as the Gladiac MX pulls slightly ahead of the SDR GeForce to take a narrow second place victory. The oddity with the ATi RF MAXX was seen throughout the testing at the 1152×864 resolution.

Things get a bit ugly for the Gladiac MX as the complexity of the benchmark goes upward. The limited memory bandwidth of the GeForce SDR and Gladiac MX keep them from competing at the higher resolutions. Even the MAXX is able to take the lead at the upper resolutions. One thing to note here is that the GeForce DDR is the only card performing well enough to be played beyond 800×600 at this quality setting.

Just to give you an idea of what these budget board can do even when challenged with FSAA mode, I’ve provided 2X Super Sampling results. The ATi solution was unable to match the same FSAA quality mode with the NVIDIA offering so we’ve just compared the GeForce and Gladiac results.

There isn’t much of a surprise here as the GeForce DDR keeps a strong lead follow by the SDR based solutions who’re running side by side. From the scores we see here, I wouldn’t bother using FSAA mode with any of these solutions.

Test Results – Evolva

The GeForce DDR continues to be the card to beat as the three others are pretty darn close together all the way to the highest resolutions. Things will only get worse for the Gladiac when we toggle into 32-bit mode.

The ATi Rage Fury MAXX flexes some muscle as it does well on the top end of things. The GeForce DDR is still doing very well but we can’t say the same for the SDR based GeForce and Gladiac.

Test Results – Evolva Bump Mapped

The ATi solution has dropped from this portion of the testing, as it couldn’t run the bump mapped setting of the Evolva Benchmark. The results continue to support the GeForce DDR as the clear performance champion in the majority of our testing. The Gladiac MX is performing right on par with the GeForce SDR and that worries me a bit.

Our last test gives no new data as the GeForce DDR holds the top spot for the final run. These GPU’s are fast, too bad we couldn’t say the same for the memory they’re coupled with.

Performance Conclusion

Clearly the GeForce DDR is the best solution if you want the fastest. I expected more from the Gladiac in our testing as it ended up being a GeForce SDR equivalent. I’m not sure how many people are willing to accept this but at the minor price difference, I’d stick with a GeForce DDR if performance were the biggest criteria for you.

Overclocking

I knew going into this that the memory would be my key to greatly improved performance numbers from the Gladiac. I modified my board with better cooling for the memory but the maximum setting for my board was the same regardless. The setting I ended up with was 200MHz core and 200MHz memory (compared to the stock 175MHz/166MHz). Obviously, the top setting matched my expectation for visual quality and stability for it to be accepted as valid. I used Quake Arena in High Quality mode to illustrate the benefits from the overclocking.

The results are very clear as we see the core overclocking bought us nearly nothing and the memory boost offering the best gains in performance. I was able to gain over 20% performance in tests by pushing the memory setting up a reasonable amount. I doubt this setting will be a problem for anyone to reach, as the setting is somewhat conservative.

Conclusion

ELSA chose to come to market as soon as they could to capture much of the GF2 MX momentum hoping to cash in on the initial rush of buyers. I think this wasn’t the right idea for this type of product as the Gladiac MX stepped into some serious competition now that it has finally been released. The sad part about this is that it is competing with some older siblings that aren’t performance slouches and with the recent price reductions, offer great value as well. The factors holding back the Gladiac MX are its price and absence of TwinView right out of the box. I had expected a little more for a little less when these GF2 MX boards surfaced.

My recommendation at this point would be to hold off until prices come down a bit as I can’t justify buying a product that offers nothing over a GeForce SDR but costs $30 more. The only saving grace will be the VIVO module for those who fancy the Video-in option. That is about the only thing the GeForce SDR can’t offer at that low of a price. The unfortunate thing for ELSA is that this need is in the minority while the majority cares more about visual quality (which is the same between the two) and performance, than anything else.