The unit that I received for review was the ELSA SYNERGY II 16mb version. I guess I just wasn’t important enough to get a 32mb version. Just Kidding Elsa….=).The SYNERGY II is an entry-level workstation graphics card and is also supposed to allow you to play some older games such as Quake2. Let’s if it can live up to it’s name. Just a little side note. I wanted to see what the SYNERGY II’S clockspeed was so I decided that I would run powerstrip. Either the board didn’t like or Elsa’s driver’s didn’t feel the program was acceptable. As I hit ok to confirm it was a tnt2 all these weird wavy lines started appearing on the screen. Needless to say I rebooted quickly and have not attempted to run powerstrip again. And yes, the card does work perfectly, so it was probably Elsa’s Drivers. Onto the first test, Image Quality.

As can be expected the SYNERGY II has the same image quality as every other tnt2 out there so I didn’t feel the need to provide any screenshots. You can be rest assured though that I did take some and evaluate them. Then onto something that seems to get overlooked, drivers. Elsa is known for their workstation graphics card so they must have good OpenGL drivers. This must be true because OpenGL was first invented for Auto-CAD and workstation type products. Elsa has excellent drivers and I trust that they work good in providing a performance boost. I was not able to test their drivers that they make especially for to accelerate certain programs. Besides that fact they have good OpenGL drivers and that shows in the Quake2 tests. Ok so we have covered image quality and drivers. Just need to cover performance.

Performance of this card was better than I expected. It will run all of your old games and some of the newer games just fine. Especially the ones that use OpenGL. As for entry level workstation it should work fine. It opens up word just a tad faster than my ERAZOR III for what it’s worth. This is an excellent card and the only thing that would stop it from not being a good workstation card is drivers. Since this is the market Elsa makes most of their money in and was founded in, you can trust them to have good drivers. If they didn’t (have good drivers) there is no way they would have made it to where they are today. So I fail to find anything wrong with this card except that it didn’t come with pizza. Oh yeah, another good thing to say about this card. It can support high resolutions really well in games. That means it will be excellent in supporting high resolutions when you are running Adobe Photoshop or SolidWorks. I mean just look at the Quake2 scores. A drop of 1 frames per second by going from 1024x768 to 1600x1200 in 32 bit color. That is what I call sweet. Even though the benchmark scores are not that high, for the most part they stay steady. That means more CPU power = better score. Now that would be an edible 3D feature, something you can so more than stare at. I have yet to, and may never, see a 3D Card come with pizza, but hey, we all have different expectations

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