Elsa Quadro FX2000: Elsa's back

REMEMBER ELSA, the famous professional 3-D graphics brand for many years? Well, it was gone last year, was it? Not really! It was reborn in Taiwan from its Asia unit, which kept the brand and quite a bit of the European vendor's original capability. Most importantly, ELSA is now not exclusively Nvidia - you can get ATI - based ELSA cards, too.

Here we play with their Quadro FX2000 128 MB card, the current Nvidia OpenGL top of the line - at least until the Quadro FX3000 starts shipping. Its DirectX 9 performance in 3DMark 03, as well as OpenGL performance in SPECviewperf 7.1, are tested.

The card was run using a Pentium 4 3GHz Canterwood PC with Intel 875PBZ mainboard, 512 MB of OCZ 3200 low latency Platinum 2-3-2-6 DDR RAM, and a 120 GB SATA HDD from Seagate. The only difference was that the Quadro FX2000 took 2 slots because of its cooling system, with that characteristic, loud initial fan noise that quietens soon after boot, but engages again when the card is deeply into, say, 3DMark simulation. The OS was Windows XP Pro SP1 , with Detonator 44.90 beta.

As you can see from the table below, the card overclocked fine till 500 MHz GPU / 1 GHz RAM, except that the speed up at the 500 MHz mark is not as good as between 400 and 450 MHz. Maybe more memory wait states?

The results are reasonably good, and it will be interesting to see how much speedup, if any, is there with the FX3000 card - which we hope to have soon for test, provided Nvidia doesn't hate us anymore. Also, it will be interesting to compare this card against ATI FireGL series as well - look for that, too. µ

Clock rate GPU/RAM		400 / 800 MHz	450 / 900 MHz	500 / 1000
1280x1024		default
		FX2000	FX2000	FX2000
3DMark 03		3547	3990	4231
Game 1	fps	131.9	145.5	156.5
Game 2	fps	20.7	23.5	25.5
Game 3	fps	18.6	21	23.1
Game 4	fps	24.4	27.6	27.4
Fill single-texture	Mtexel/s	1066.7	1207	1342.9
Fill multi-texture	Mtexel/s	2651.5	2990.8	3338.3
Vertex shader	fps	14.7	16.6	18.4
Pixel shader	fps	26.4	29.8	33.1
Ragtroll	fps	12.3	13.7	15.3
Viewperf 7.1
3dsmax-02		23.35	24.16	25.3
drv-09		68.45	70.29	71.98
dx-08		72.08	72.05	72.08
light-06		29.8	29.86	29.9
proe-02		31.39	33.89	34.72
ugs-03		32.6	34.94	35.34