ELSA ERAZOR X SDR GeForce

A while back at the lab we were a bit surprised to learn that NVIDIA would begin producing the powerful GeForce chip to run a a 'slow' 120 MHz core clock speed, a speed even surpassed with the release of the TNT2 chipset. The reason that the speed of the GeForce is a bit low considering the increase in technology is due to the increased number of transistors in the GeForce chip, resulting in a hotter running temperature. By sending out the GeForce cards with anything more than a core speed of 120 MHz, NVIDIA faced overheating problems in poorly designed cards. It appears, however, that the ELSA board is not one of these inferior products, as overclocking abilities of the card were impressive, most likely due to the overly large heat sink placed above the processor.

By poking around the driver utilities, we eventually stumbled upon ELSA's included overclocking utility which allowed us to push the card to a core of 150 MHz and a memory clock of 150 MHz. This should suffice for the cautious users out there, but we at the lab always want more, thus necessitating an install of the powerful Power Strip utility for further overclocking. At the stock speed of a 120 MHz core, the maximum temperature reached under extensive 3D gaming was about 69 degrees Celsius. In the lab we were able to push the core speed up to a blazing 150 MHz (proving that ELSA made a wise choice when making this the limit of the included overclocking program), a full 30 MHz above the stock speed. Any further increase in core speed resulted in system failure after a few 3D runs, partly due to the fact that at 150 MHz the chip was reading a not so cool 79 degrees Celsius.

The overclocking of the 32 MB of SEC SDRAM was typical of other 5.5 nanosecond (183 MHz) SDRAM chips in GeForce cards. In the AnandTech lab we were able to push the RAM speed up from a stock 166 MHz to 183 MHz, providing a nice improvement in card speed. Thus, by utilizing the cool running temperature of the testbed system, the ELSA ERAZOR X was able to clock in at a very fast 150/183 MHz. The high core speed achieved can be attributed to the rather large heat sink and fan placed on the card, in fact it is the largest heat sink seen on any GeForce video cards that have passed through the lab, measuring 5 cm x 5 cm (the other GeForce cards have a 4 cm x 4 cm heat sink on them).