Like many innocents, I purchased a GLADIAC Geforce 2 at the local Electronic Boutique on 5/02, only to find that the card INSIDE the box looks nothing like the one pictured OUTSIDE the box! In fact, the GLADIAC is nothing more than a VisionTek OEM generic card with a different BIOS ship that identifies it as an ELSA card!
No blue PCB, no mention of ELSA anywhere on the card, even the serial number is non-ELSA.
Equally galling was the shoddy workmanship evidenced in the heatsink/fan application, as there was a poorly applied 3mm thick gob of thermal epoxy between the GPU and the HS. The back of the GPU became very hot during use as there can't be any thermal transfer with that thick layer of epoxy. This contrasts greatly with the elegant job ASUS and Guillemot (and even Leadtek) have done with their detachable heatsinks.
To top it off, there are serious driver problems when using a sound card featuring an Aureal 2.0 chipset; as soon as drivers are loaded on startup there will be a protection error, and on reboot the Aureal DOS Sound Blaster emulation would be turned off. This was apparent with the 5.16 driver upgrade only, as it didn't happen to me with the shipping 5.13 based ones.
I ended up taking it back, and ordered a 64 MB RAM Prophet 2 that should arrive in two weeks, for only $60 more. This card has heatsinks on the memory chips, for what it's worth.
AHAHAH...Now I know why you keep preaching your message against Nvidia's Geforce2. You are a 3DFX PR person and you are trying to spread rumors that the Gladiac sucks, so you should be quiet. I had bought a Gladiac and I loved it, It played my games at an extremely High FPS, and they were beautiful with the bump-Mapping and per-pixel shading on. I was extremely happy with it, although, the price was not acceptable for the fact that I am not a rich 3DFX executive
with money to spare, so I took it back in order to wait for the price to drop.
..."As Iron sharpens Iron, so one man sharpens another"...
Proverbs 27:17
Geees, he's just bithing because Elsa kinda did a bait and switch with their first Gladiac's. Where does he even mention 3dfx? I was preaching against the GeForce myself for awhile but have come to terms with the damn thing. I tried a Prophet2 GeForce2 and games were rockin' but CAD was down below the GeForceSDR per ProCDRS benchmark. Real strange as games were 1 1/2 times the GeForceSDR. I took it back for this reason, can't wait for driver's to mature. Especially at $360US for the card, it should kick *** out of the box.
Hey guys, I am in no way shape or form a 3DFX mouthpiece.
Besides the galling lack of quality control as evidenced by the poor heatsonk application, I am incensed at ELSA for trying to scam me out of no less than $360 for such a piece of trash.
I ahve a Xitel Strorm Platinum with drivers that aren't the newest. I had no problems with the shipping drivers, but when I tried the ELSA 5.16, I got Windows protection errors at start up.
My ASUS 3400 is in for now, but on 6/06 the 64 MB Prophet II is coming in, with default clock/ memory timings faster than the 32 MB cards!
Elsa's 5.16 or NVIDIA's 5.16? I am using NVIDIA's. I have upped it to the 5.22 since this morning, no problems so far. So, I would suggest getting the reference drivers from NVIDIA and updating your SQ2500 drivers and see if that picks you up. If not, I am afraid the betaness of the drivers has gotten you.
I doubt this GLADIAC SCAM card is any better than any others, and compared to the Guillemot or ASUS models I have seen it is of noticeably cheaper construction: witness the detachable fan/hs on the above two cards vs. the ****ty one on the SCAM CARD fro ELSA.
BTW, the HErcules 64 MB I got instaed has faster memory !;-)
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