|
Sparkle Calibre 7900 GT (P790+) 512MB Review |
|
Written by Mavke
|
|
Wednesday, 06 September 2006 |
This time we'll be looking at two lovely pre-overclocked cards from the guys that will make your eyes sparkle. Sparkle is a company that has been around in the graphics arena for quite some time. None the less, the company always remained a little transparent in the European and US market. They are not really out there with reviews or marketing and thus a lot of consumers simply do not see or know them. And that's a loss when you have a consumer in the store comparing cards. If it's an ASUS and it'll cost a bit more then people will buy the ASUS by brand recognition alone. Strangly Sparkle is still not that popular as a brand, though the products looked at today are among the finest we have ever seen. - Guru3D
 Sparkle Calibre 7900 GT (P790+) 512MB Review
Sparkle has their usual line of cards and then their Calibre line of cards as well. Much like other companies, the Calibre series is slightly more expensive yet you'll receive some pretty nifty extra candy. In the case of the GeForce 7900 GT they are offering a Caliber P790 and P790+ model of this video card and we'll be looking at that Calibre P790+ model. The reference model GeForce 7900 GT runs at 450MHz and it's memory at 1320MHz. This model is clocked at 560MHz and it's memory at 1400MHz. Not only that, this model does not have 256MB memory but 512MB of GDDR3 memory.
Back in March when the GeForce 7900 GT was released we called this series the winner of the three new product that were released that day. It's a top-segment mid-range product yet offering performance close to the high-end graphics cards for an amazing price. The GeForce 7900 GT is pretty much a slowed down version of the GeForce 7900 GTX. It has the very same pixel pipelines and vertex processors as the GTX, in fact it's the same G71 chip yet it's clocked significantly slower at 450MHz. It is armed with GDDR3 memory running at 1320MHz and also was brought down from 512MB towards 256MB.
The card is producing much less heat due to the lower clocks and a nice side effect of that is that it's a single slot solution whereas the GTX has the bigger dual slot heatpipe cooler. Sparkle offers the Calibre series of cards. It features a new and very silent cooler, nice blue colored PCB, faster clocks for core and memory and to top it off, that 512MB of memory. It has all the functions and specifications as mentioned, yet since this is the P790+ model again we have slightly higher than usual core and memory speeds. The graphics core is clocked at an impressive 560MHz and memory is running at 1400MHz.
So that's a really aggressive default overclock, very impressive. The video card also comes with a new cooler. Lately we have been complaining about the reference coolers from NVIDIA as we think they produce too much sound. This cooler is virtually silent and very effective. Well impressive. You guys already know that we are a big fan of the GeForce 7900 GT card series. But this Calibre and especially the P790+ version rocks in every way it can. Compared over the reference GeForce 7900 GT with 512MB the performance increase is substantial and in most cases very notable.
This is a lower segment priced high-end graphics card that is performing extremely well for it's money. Suffice to say that the 512MB memory will boost the price a little, it's well invested though as we already see several games pick up on that trend. Higher guality textures, high image quality settings and better performance is what the extra 256MB will bring you. We just checked and at the moment you can purchase this card as shown for roughly €329, so two in SLI will set you back €660. The one thing you need to keep in mind is that a GeForce 7950 GX2 will cost you €550 and it offers only slightly less performance.
The Sparkle Calibre P790+ is slightly more expensive then the regular GeForce 7900 GT, but it's clocked higher and thus performs better, comes with a great hard- and software bundle and a really nice cooling solution. I was and still am impressed, this is looking like a high class product and therefore comes highly recommended by yours truly.
Related Articles
NVIDIA's GeForce 7900 GS, 7500 GT graphics cards
NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT pricing drops to €199
BFG GeForce 7600 & 7900 GT OC 256MB Review
|
NiBiTor v4.5a
