SPARKLE CAME OUT today with two very interesting products, Cool-Pipe 3 and Calibre P888. The first board is none other than Dr. Jekyll - it targets users that want silent but performing machines, while Mr. Hyde is targeted at the overclocking crowd.

Meet Dr. Jekyll - silent, pixel churning fella'

The Geforce 8800GT Cool-Pipe 3 sports three heat-pipes that are connected from the middle of GPU to the backside, where aluminium fins should dissipate heat with no major problem. Potentially, this card is one of best overclockers – just put a big fan or provide significant airflow to the fins and the dissipating surface is such that no classic single-slot cooling will be able to rival this one. However, given the size of the heatsink for upcoming Nforce 780i chipset, we hope thae guys at Sparkle left some headroom for that monster.

The card is clocked at default Nvidia clocks, but if you want silence and performance in the same sentence, this just might be the ticket.

On the other hand, the Calibre P888 does not hide what crowd is its target audience. It comes with a dual-slot cooler that has a 150W T.E.C. aka Peltier element, capable of cooling this bad boy to lowest ambient temperatures allow. We were however, surprised to see that Sparkle did not push the card above 700 MHz for the GPU, since we have seen single-slot products that work at that clock. According to Sparkle, they wanted to leave enough additional headroom for overclocking.

Mr. Hyde has nothing to hide... Peltier inside, two fans outside

Calibre P888 is clocked at 675 MHz for the GPU, 1.73 GHz for Shaders and stock 900 MHz DDR (1.8 GHz) for video memory, yielding 57.6 GB/s. We're somewhat disappointed with the specs, but if the GPU and the memory turn out to be clockable as previous parts, it should prove to be quite an interesting part.

You should have in mind that both cards come on Sparkle's blue PCB, so this is a non-reference product. As it usually happens, both products are available today, since Nvidia prepared 50.000 boards for the first wave, and the number of chips given to board manufacturers was in similar range. Reference and overclocked parts at launch - all in all, quite a good launch from Nvidia and its partners. µ