Erazor III Specs

Elsa is a well-respected company out of Germany that brought us the Erazor series of 3D accelerators. Elsa has been in the business for about 15 years, and does strictly video. They have a wide variety of cards, ranging from professional graphics/CAD cards to moderate home graphics cards. About the only sector they haven't hit is the low-end market.

Although less-known in the US, Elsa has a wide variety of consumer accelerators, ranging from the Voodoo Banshee, Permedia 2, Savage3D, to several products based nVidia chipsets. The Erazor LT was based off of the Riva128 chipset, while the Erazor II was a TNT 1 card. This brings us to the Erazor III, based on nVidia's reference TNT2 spec.

What specs?

TwiN-Texel (TNT) 32-bit graphics pipeline

16 MB video RAM

300 MHz RAMDAC

100% hardware triangle setup

16 and 32-bit ARGB rendering (RGB plus alpha)

Single pass multi-texturing support, square and non-square texture support

Point-sampled, bilinear, trilinear, and 8-tap anisotropic filtering

Per pixel perspective correct texture mapping: fog, light, MIP mapping

Point sampled, bilinear, trilinear and 8-tap anistropic filtering

24-bit Z-buffer, 8-bit stencil buffer

Full scene anti-aliasing

AGP texturing

Full-scene anti-aliasing

128-bit 2D pipeline, optimized for 8, 16, 32-bit color depths

Support for textures up to 2048x2048 (2K x 2K)

Maximum 2D/3D resolution of 2048x1536

AGP 4x/2x/1x support, with sideband support

Bump mapping (emboss), light maps, reflection and environmental maps

Hardware subpicture blending for better DVD performance

The Erazor III we previewed is a prerelease model, so keep that in mind when looking over specs or benchmarks, as things may change slightly over time. The Erazor III follows the reference spec carefully, with 16 MB of Samsung G7 4x64 SDRAM . The card itself has a heatsink but no fan, as is recommended with standard "vanilla" TNT2s. At 125Mhz core 150Mhz memory, we soon learned that the TNT2 runs pretty cool, so reserving the fan for the Ultra varieties wasn't just for cutting corners.

After several hours of operation, the heatsink was warm to the touch, but definitely not a heat concern. Verifying this with our digital thermometer showed that the temperature was hovering around 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Keep in mind, though, that our office is constantly air conditioned.