Sun flower fan helps graphics to sparkle
Shine on you crazy heatsink
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
Comments
BUY THEIR PRODUCTS!
The title of the "article" (*cough*) should be "Help Sparkle help us, buy their great products!"9600GT?
9600GT? Crysis? DX10?Easily handled?
Hmmmmmm...
Flutter on the bottom
I'm very impressed with how the circular fins, like people used to use in the good old days (I have a 5200 with this design), is suddenly an improvement over ducting the air out of the case. The ability to blow air off the bottom of the card is particularly clever, given that there's a motherboard in the way of the airflow - perhaps it ships with a drill for making holes?I'm a little bitter. The entire reason my current rig is water cooled is that the 6800 vintage nVidia cards blow air from the rear of the case to the front, setting up a nice little loop of warm air when combined with all the case fans which are blowing the other way. I rejoiced that they got their act together and started ducting air out the back.
The Sparkle board looks like a two slot solution (even though it only has one backplate). If that's not just a misleading picture, I can't see how dumping 100W inside the case from the 9600 is going to be better than conventionally shuffling the hot air out of the way, no matter how nominally novel the fan design.
Interesting choice of 1GB, although I think they're over-selling its capabilities a bit (if this card could run anything at full whack, nobody would sell 8800GTs). I'd be happier with a 1GB 9800GTX - or even a 768MB 9800 Ultra, if it turns out that there have been some spare pins on the memory interface this whole time.
Flutter on the bottom
I'm very impressed with how the circular fins, like people used to use in the good old days (I have a 5200 with this design), is suddenly an improvement over ducting the air out of the case. The ability to blow air off the bottom of the card is particularly clever, given that there's a motherboard in the way of the airflow - perhaps it ships with a drill for making holes?I'm a little bitter. The entire reason my current rig is water cooled is that the 6800 vintage nVidia cards blow air from the rear of the case to the front, setting up a nice little loop of warm air when combined with all the case fans which are blowing the other way. I rejoiced that they got their act together and started ducting air out the back.
The Sparkle board looks like a two slot solution (even though it only has one backplate). If that's not just a misleading picture, I can't see how dumping 100W inside the case from the 9600 is going to be better than conventionally shuffling the hot air out of the way, no matter how nominally novel the fan design.
Interesting choice of 1GB, although I think they're over-selling its capabilities a bit (if this card could run anything at full whack, nobody would sell 8800GTs). I'd be happier with a 1GB 9800GTX - or even a 768MB 9800 Ultra, if it turns out that there have been some spare pins on the memory interface this whole time.