Test Rig Configuration

That's it about the card itself, from a hardware and design point of view. Leaving you with all with this impression on the Sparkle Calibre 8800 GTX OC edition we are going to move to the performance you can expect from this graphics accelerator. The system used to compile and analyze the gaming performance figures is build around the high-end Intel Core 2 Duo technology, which will provide extensive central processing power supporting the G80 visual and processing capabilities. We are using our new and high performing system based around the Intel 975X Express chipset powering our mainboard. So, let's go through the system specifications...

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86GHz Dual Core Processor
• ASUS P5W Digital Home Deluxe (i975X) Mainboard
• Crucial Ballistix 2GB PC2-8000 Dual Channel Memory
• Sparkle Calibre 8800 GTX OC 768MB Graphics Card
• Gainward BLISS 8800 GTS 640MB Graphics Card
• Western Digital 320GB Caviar SE 8MB Cache Hard Disk
• Speeze RockeTeer 600W (SLI Ready) Power Supply
• Spire Pininfarina SP-ATX-PALU Silver Tower Case
• Dell UltraSharp 30" 3007WFP (Black) LCD Flat Display
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional incl. SP2 Edition

As you can see we have used the some high performance components, and we would like to express our thanks to Sparkle, Crucial and Gainward for their generosity on supplying us with some excellent hardware. The ASUS mainboard is based around the Intel 975X chipset supporting the Intel Core 2 Duo processor and DDR2 memory. We will be using our modest Core 2 Duo E6300 but running at 2.8GHz to support the high-end graphics cards. So both the mainboard and CPU are fine tuned to support this overclocking, to provide the maximum compatible and stable clock speeds. Currently the Core 2 Duo processors are the top of the market, with AMD trailing behind. Yeah, you may say and what about the Core 2 Quad from Intel? Well when looking at the game titles, none of these fully support the quad core technology yet.

And a very special thank you to Dollarshop for supplying us a retail sample of the Sparkle Calibre 8800 GTX OC edition for a quite extended period. This very flexible way of using the Calibre graphics accelerator allowed us to do some extra tweaking, and analysis on the actual impact of the shader clock on the gaming performance. We truly enjoyed playing with the Sparkle Calibre series, and gave us great pleasure.

Additional Specifications

First we will grab some information from Everest Ultimate Edition and get some feedback on the video card sub system. Lavalys was nice enough to allow us to evaluate their software for our reviews. I really like the wealth of information this utility gives us and we thank Lavalys for their support. Everest Ultimate Edition 2007 is the cutting-edge benchmarking and diagnostics tool to maximize security, performance, and troubleshooting capabilities for home and office PC environments, PC professionals and consulting firms as well as OEM partners and configuration centers worldwide. We ran some analyzing tests using Everest and this is what we got.

Okay, the GeForce 8800 GTX is totally different as to what we have seen previously from NVIDIA and that has to do with the unified shader technology. We don't speak anymore about fixed vertex and pixel shaders but about stream processors that can be used according to what is required. So these stream processors are capable of being dynamically allocated to vertex, pixel, geometry or physics operations. The Sparkle Calibre version of the GTX comes clocked at 630/1960MHz with a shader clock at 1350MHz, which are actually the standard clock speeds. The Calibre 8800 GTX OC edition is powered by the G80 core and features 128 stream processors and 24 raster operations units. Before going further, we would like to show of the Sparkle Calibre card being placed in our system. Let's do that and see how the Sparkle Calibre 8800 GTX OC edition fills up a free PCI Express expansion slot.

Yeah installed and ready to power our system. But before we go on, this card looks good in our system, what am I saying it looks awesome! We can already notice that the cooling does not interfere with surrounding motherboard components. Although the Sparkle Calibre 8800 GTX OC edition is a dual slot design it fits perfectly in our case. So you are right, the Sparkle Calibre card takes up one addition expansion slot, but then again it comes with a very decent cooling solution even at full load. That's it folks, time to hit up some synthetic benchmarks. We used the ForceWare 97.44 drivers from NVIDIA and will be using Futuremark and AquaMark benchmark utilities and stack up some popular game titles. Let's hit the road...