ELSA ships the $299 Synergy II workstation card

ELSA’s Synergy II board is shipping now, and the price is the story: $299 for a workstation-class OpenGL card built on Nvidia’s RIVA TNT2, with up to 32MB of memory on an AGP 4X/2X interface. This one is aimed at the CAD, 3D animation, and engineering crowd rather than at Quake players, with ELSA’s own certified OpenGL drivers doing the heavy lifting.

The card also carries SIMDream, ELSA’s Pentium III optimization that feeds Streaming SIMD Extensions into its OpenGL and Windows NT drivers for geometry, transform, and lighting work. It is WHQL certified and already picked up Cadence Magazine’s Show Stopper Award at the National Design and Engineering Show this spring. Workstation boards usually cost several times this much, so if the drivers hold up, ELSA just made a lot of budget meetings shorter.