Posted: May 15, 2000
Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen
Cost: About $350

Summing Things Up...

Performance:
[ 9/10 ]

The Gladiac performed extremely well, and that's considering that it's currently the fastest card on the market. What more can we ask for? You will appreciate the new features that help the card spew out polygons faster than you can say "I can't believe it's not butter." Game performance is playable all the way up to 1280x1024 and usually higher on most games.

FSAA currently works but not what it should be like. FSAA is currently in the drivers, but this does not mean that it functions properly. The UT screenshots are evidence of this.

Innovation:
[ 8/10 ]

Elsa chose to stick to nVIDIA's reference design but the GeForce 2 GTS itself is what really makes this card a winner. Sporting features such as NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer, a 0.18u fabrication and other refinements and new features, it's definitely a force to be reckoned with.

Installation and Setup:
[ 6.5/10 ]

For us, the setup process was not pretty. The card did not like the MX300 at all, and I only found that out after hours of diagnosing what could be causing the problem. It seems that this could be driver issues as the Elsa driver is based on the beta 5.16 Detonators. The same problem occurs with the Detonators as well. Other than that, the card worked flawlessly.

Bundle:
[ 8.5/10 ]

The CD contains drivers, nVIDIA's demos that show off the card, utilities such as NetMeeting, DirectX7.0a, Adobe Acrobat, and a few more utilities. Also included is a software called MainActor. It's a video capturing and editing software. It's pretty basic but unfortunately we could not test it because our Gladiac card didn't come with the VIVO module that let's you capture and output video.

There weren't any games that came with the card but Elsa has chosen 10 of the hottest games available and will let you choose 2 of them for free. All of the games are full version retail games. If you want more than 2 games, you can purchase more from the list of 10 for under $20US each! That's a really good discount just for buying the Gladiac.

Price:
[ 7/10 ]

Currently, the 32MB Gladiac goes for around $350US and the 64MB version is expected to sell for around $450. Paying $350 for a card will be expensive depending on where you're coming from. If you're a TNT2 class user or below, $350 is not a bad deal for this type of "insane performance". But those of you who already have a GeForce based card should consider otherwise and probably wait until the fall when the price drops. But then again, if you make mountains of money, go right ahead!

Conclusion

Even though Elsa didn't differentiate the design of the card much from the nVIDIA reference board, the drivers were extensive and the card performed very well. Being the first version of the Gladiac, it also overclocked very well. And proceeding cards may perform even better...

We can't really compare the Gladiac to another GeForce 2 GTS card because, well, it's the only GeForce 2 GTS card currently on the market -- making it the fastest card out there. So it's hard to tell whether the performance should be better or not but we're pretty sure it'll be one of the top performing cards out there if Elsa can continually tweak its drivers and provide timely updates.

The game selection option Elsa has provided is really good because everyone is probably tired of cards coming with half decent games, games that every other product comes with (*cough* Incoming!) or games that were released almost two years ago. We appreciate the price savings on successive games as well.

Another good thing to note is that Elsa provides an extensive six year warranty on the Gladiac should anything happen like over… er… never mind, heh, that voids the warranty. D'oh.

Elsa has produced a winner, and we are really happy with the Gladiac (after all that cringing during setup) and until anyone comes up with a better bundle and better features, the Gladiac is currently state-of-the-art.

Overall Rating: 8.0 / 10

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