NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GT launched to much praise from us, you all and other reviewers altogether. Today we're looking at a very special GeForce 8800 GT that those building silent PC's may be interested in. But, before we go much further must address the current situation with the GeForce 8800 GT. NVIDIA's original target for the GeForce 8800 GT was $199 for the 256MB version and $249 for the 512MB version, and while 256MB cards are just now starting to appear in the worldwide market, 512MB cards just can't be bought at those prices. A quick look at Newegg shows that most cards are priced between $270 and $320, but almost all cards are out of stock at this time. - AnandTech

Sparkle GeForce 8800 GT Passive Video Card Review

If you want one of these things right away it looks like it'll cost you as much as $100 to get it shipped overnight. Factor in some sort of speedy shipping and you're looking at close to a $400 investment for what was supposed to be a $250 card. With the fruits of capitalism come the inevitable sour grapes, the GeForce 8800 GT is a hot item and vendors will do whatever they can to maximize profit on it. AMD is convinced that this is all a giant conspiracy by NVIDIA to hurt the launch of the Radeon HD 3800 series. Create buzz for a product that on paper destroys the Radeon HD 3870 but don't produce enough to make that happen.

The night before our GeForce 8800 GT article went live, we gotten called to let us know that Sparkle sent along images of a passively cooled Georce 8800 GT. Said one word impossible. Well we told him that it had to be a trick because there was no way you were going to get a GeForce 8800 GT running without a fan, the card was simply too hot. The 754 million transistors that make up the G92 were simply switching too fast and dissipating too much heat to be cooled by anything without a fan. Sparkle could've lowered the clocks, that would've made it possible, but we thought there was just no way at stock speeds.

We were still skeptical. We've received passively cooled video cards before that wouldn't even work at their stock speeds due to inadequate cooling. But in the back of our mind we were hopeful, after all, the idea of having a GeForce 8800 GT without a fan was simply too good. We've already benchmarked the GeForce 8800 GT and shown that it is faster than the vast majority of NVIDIA's lineup, easily offering GeForce 8800 GTX performance at a lower price. Since a silent GeForce 8800 GTX isn't possible, the 65nm G92 GPU on the GeForce 8800 GT could just make a few dreams come true. Well lets have at it!

As we've already mentioned, the GeForce8800 GT Passive is bone stock running at a 600MHz core clock, 1.5GHz shader clock and 1.8GHz memory data rate. In other words, this passively cooled best will perform identically to the GeForce 8800 GT we checked out earlier. The front of the card is amazingly simple, there's a black plate where we would normally see a massive heatsink and a small Sparkle logo, well, sparkles, in the lower right. Sparkle keeps the tough job of cooling away from the front, instead all we've got here is a plate that attaches three heatpipes to the G92 GPU and that's it.

We are impressed. Usually home theatre PC'ers have to make a tremendous tradeoff when picking a graphics card, more often than not they're stuck with a pretty fast, but still mid-range GPU. With the GeForce 8800 GT, we have a GPU that's basically as fast as a GeForce 8800 GTX and with Sparkle's card we have such a beast without a fan. The card gets hot, but as we've seen, it can easily be used inside a case alongside a very warm CPU. A well ventilated chassis will obviously help and we're not sure what the high temperatures will do to the longevity of the GPU, but that's what warranties are for.

The only thing Sparkle's GeForce 8800 GT is missing is HDMI output, but we figure most home theatre PC users are accustomed to dealing with using DVI only at this point. We do commend Sparkle for making sure that its first GeForce 8800 GT would be passively cooled, if more companies would take this approach we might actually see some better product differentiation in the market. Pricing isn't bad either, although we're skeptical until we actually see these things ship. Given how quickly the other GeForce 8800 GT's have sold out, if you see this thing at $319 and are interested, we suggest moving quickly.