Introduction

The GeForce 2 cards are coming!

Yesterday we unveiled NVIDIA's latest and greatest graphics chip: GeForce 2 GTS. Today we bring you our first review of an actual product based on this chip: The Elsa GLADIAC

That's right, you heard it right the first time, the Elsa GLADIAC! If you follow the 3D graphics market closely, you may be surprised to see that our first GeForce 2 review is based on a product from Elsa. In the past, Elsa product launches trailed their competitors to give Elsa's engineers added time to work on improving NVIDIA's reference design.

With the GeForce 2 GTS launch, Elsa has decided to change their strategy and offer their product as soon as possible. This of course means NVIDIA's reference design was used - Elsa must have learned from previous experience that improving upon an already solid design isn't easy.

Like GeForce 256 (and every other NVIDIA chip for that matter) multiple vendors will be offering boards based on GeForce 2 GTS. Tier One customers ASUS, Creative Labs, Elsa, Guillemot, and Leadtek should be first with shipping boards, followed by products from other players in the following months.

It's still very early in the game, so we're still unsure what the various card manufacturers will do to differentiate their products from each other. We don't expect card manufacturers that sell large volumes of cards to overclock their product in-house, but overclocking utilities will likely be available in one form or another.

Elsa...they're a German company right?

We're sure many of you are wondering, "who is Elsa, and why should I consider their GeForce 2 board?" Well, first of all, Elsa is a very close partner with NVIDIA. In fact, Elsa is the only manufacturer with an NVIDIA Quadro board, the Gloria II.

To answer the second question, besides having a really cool software bundle (which is something we don't say very often!) Elsa's GLADIAC board should be available on store shelves by the beginning of next week, and in some cases, even sooner! We'll talk a bit more about this totally unique gaming software bundle later in this article, but being among the first with a shipping product is usually a good thing.

So how does one of the first retail GeForce 2 GTS boards perform? Incredibly fast of course! Read on to find out precisely how fast as well as initial pricing for the GLADIAC, and of course to see what additional products lie in the GLADIAC's future!