by Anton Shilov
07/16/2003 | 10:22 AM
ELSA Korea recently introduced a professional graphics card based on ATI Technologies FIRE GL X1 and Z1 graphics processors. Korean ELSA used to sell products based on NVIDIA GPUs only, but started to use VPUs from ATI in consumer graphics cards last year and now adopted professional solutions from the Markham, Ontario-based chip developer as well.
<%BANNER[article]%>Soon the Korean firm will start to sell ATI FIRE GL X1 and Z1-based graphics cards for professional users. Both products are equipped with two DVI connectors. ATI FIRE GL X1 and Z1 are clocked at 324MHz for the VPU and 276MHz (552MHz) for the DDR SDRAM memory. The difference between the products is in the graphics processors: the FIRE GL X1 is based on the RADEON 9700 technology, hence, features 8 rendering pipelines, while the FIRE GL Z1 is powered by the RADEON 9500 technology with only 4 pixel pipelines.
Korean web-site DarkCrow published the pictures of the FIRE GL X1 product box and the graphics card. Obviously, the card itself is made on the same facility where the original FIRE GL products are manufactured, so, you should not worry about the quality.
ELSA is well-known for its proprietary software for professional graphics cards, however, all those additional advantages it offers were developed only for devices based on NVIDIA Quadro-series processors. In this case I doubt that FIRE GL products sold under ELSA brand-name will have any additional advantages over products built by ATI. If they actually will have some proprietary software, ELSA will obviously spend more funds on support, what is not a good news for the firm’s owners.
The MSRP of the X1-128MB is about $800, the FIRE GL Z1 costs about $600. Certainly, pricing in