Elsa Erazor III

Elsa may not be the first company that comes to mind when you think of popular consumer-oriented video cards. They’re better known for the video cards they make for the professional market. However, they do indeed have a handful of video cards for the rest of us, including the Erazor III. The particular package we tested includes Elsa’s Revelator 3D glasses, which are supposed to enhance 3-D images. We didn’t really notice much difference, however, and would probably skip this little extra.

The Erazor III is yet another video card based on NVIDIA’s ubiquitous RIVA TNT2 Ultra graphics chip. It supports AGP 2X and 4X and has the standard 32MB of SDRAM. Its maximum resolution, at 1,920 x 1,200, is a bit lower than several other cards we reviewed. That should be sufficient for most consumers, however. The refresh rates range from 60Hz to 200Hz. The Erazor II supports a maximum 32-bit color depth and has a 300MHz RAMDAC.

The Erazor III covers the other essentials, supporting the Direct3D and OpenGL APIs. It is also compatible with the big three operating systems, Win9x and WinNT4.0.

When it comes to 2-D applications, the Erazor III is just an average card, as our SYSMark 98 tests demonstrate. The Erazor III’s overall score of 185 placed it fourth. It managed a score of 186 for office productivity (third) and 184 for content creation, which was only good enough for sixth place in this category.

The Erazor III is clearly more suited to 3-D tasks than the 2-D environment, as the rest of our testing indicates. The Erazor III marked a frame rate of 86.5fps during our Quake II test at a resolution of 640 x 480. However, the Erazor III choked a bit when we raised the resolution to 1,024 x 768. The frame rate dropped to 53fps, which was only sixth best out of the seven video cards we tested. That’s quite a disappointing drop, but the Erazor III picked up the pace again during our next phase of testing.

The Erazor III did especially well in our 3D Marks test. It racked up a total score of 4,577, finishing behind only Guillemot’s Xentor 32 video card.

This is a well-balanced video card. It handles 2-D applications well enough and does very well with 3-D applications. The Erazor III comes in three different packages, based on the extras bundled with each one (such as the Revelator 3-D glasses), and the prices range from about $125 to $175.
 

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By: Lacey