A Barely Affordable Gamer's Dream Solution
How many users would spend more than $500 on a graphics card? I can only guess, but this market seems to be definitely profitable, as several companies are offering graphics solutions at this price range and beyond. The situation surprises you even more once you consider that even AMD's fastest Athlon processor can already be obtained for less. It seems quite obvious that the component with the biggest impact on game performance is no longer the CPU.
However, everybody should check his real requirements before making the decision to buy a frame rate monster. A reasonably equipped PC consists of a decent CPU (600+ MHz), 128 MB main memory, a fast hard drive and usually a 32 MB graphics card. That's basically enough to handle the majority of common applications and games. 'Serious' gamers are not interested in such ordinary systems though. Latest action games and 3D shooters need pure power - the more, the better. Particularly high screen resolutions and highly detailed scenes will make the standard system look like an old and ugly bird. Elsa's Gladiac Ultra is confidently titled as "World's Fastest Gamer's Board". Of course we wanted to know what's behind this claim; so we checked if this product is actually worth its money.
