Sun flower fan helps graphics to sparkle

11 Apr 2008 | 13:21 BST

By Stewart Meagher

TAIWANESE GRAPHICS card maker Sparkle has announced the release of a new top-end pixel muncher based on Nvidia's Geforce 9 chipset.

Boasting a full Gig of onboard memory, Sparkle reckons that the new fan-cooled card will "easily handle" the most demanding Direct X10 games on the market today, including Crysis, Gears of War and Bioshock. It will also churn pretty decent HD video at resolutions up to and including 1080i.

The card complies with the PCI Express 2.0 standard and can maximize the usage of 5GT/s bandwidth. It is also backwardly compatible with PCI Express 1.1 motherboards.

Excess heat is dealt with by Sparkle's newly-designed "Sun Flower" cooling fan which uses a new "pressure casting" process which allows the radial aluminium fins to dissipate heat from the bottom of the unit as well as the top.

No pricing was available at time of writing, but here are some less scary numbers for you to drool over. µ

Graphics Processing Unit
GeForce 9600 GT
Core Clock
650MHz
Memory Clock
1800MHz
Memory Type
1GB GDDR3
Memory Interface
256-bit
Stream Processors
64
Stream Processors Clock
1625MHz
Bus Type
PCI-Express 2.0
RAMDAC
400 MHz
Outputs
Dual DVI-I
HDTV
Resolution up to 1920 X 1080i
HDCP
Yes

L'Inq
Sparkle

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