First Impressions and Overclocking

The Cards

The Erazor X

The Back

A reference design

The Back

As you can see from the pictures, the ELSA is one of the few GeForce cards we've seen that doesn't use the standard NVIDIA reference design. According to ELSA, "ELSA does not produce NVIDIA's reference design, instead, we produce ELSA designs implementing our own modifications to optimize the image quality and the definition of the image signal allow the graphics memory and the controller to use a higher clock rate."

The Memory

Our evaluation board has four 64Mbit(8MB) 5.5ns(C=5.5ns) Samsung SDRAM chips. The 5.5ns memory rating leaves plenty of room for overclocking above the 166MHz default setting. The card uses a thin, oversized heatsink and a slimline fan.

Overclocking

We've seen plenty of GeForce boards in the past few weeks, and we've had the opportunity to overclock all of them. The chip on our original reference card could only overclock up to a paltry 125MHz, but the chip on the ASUS board we tested could reach 140MHz without a problem. Hopefully that means that yields are improving, or it could just be luck (or golden samples).

ELSA includes an overclocking utility in the drivers with the usual core clock and memory sliders. The memory clock slider has a 190MHz maximum, and slider on the core clock can reach a generous 150MHz.

Testing the memory first, we were able to get the card stable at 183MHz. At 190MHz, artifacts appeared on the desktop. Next, we moved on to the core clock. The card made it all the way up to the 150Hz maximum. Our ELSA evalutation board managed to reach 150/183MHz. Nice!