We have checked out ATI's Radeon HD 4550 low-end graphics card already and found it to be a nice solution for Linux users on a budget, but how does NVIDIA's competitor contend? Well in this article we are looking at the NVIDIA GeForce 9500GT from Sparkle. This graphics card has 1GB of DDR2 memory along with DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort connectors. This is a low-end card that comes with good features to replace those on-board graphics cards, providing some extra performance at a very nice price tag. It should be able to play games but don't expect too much, though it will be silent and good for multimedia applications and as such very useful for making a home theatre box. - Phonorix

Sparkle GeForce 9500 GT 1GB Graphics Style Review

This is just our first time looking at a graphics card from Sparkle, but we were pleased with the packaging. On the outside you will just find the usual graphics and lists of features for the graphics card, while included inside was the generic quick start guide, driver CD, DVI to analog adapter, and an audio header cable so that the graphics card can direct sound through the HDMI interface. The single slot graphics card was protected by a bubble wrap. The graphics cards using NVIDIA's GeForce 9500 GT are generally sub-$100 retail products and some of them go as low as $50, which is really low for such a low-end card.

With these being low-end graphics cards, they go without any elaborate cooling solutions or any extras. And since the GeForce 9500 GT is a low-power graphics processor, an active heatsink isn't needed. Some of the GeForce 9500 GT models manufactured by Sparkle and other partners simply use a passive cooler. With the Sparkle GeForce 9500 GT card we have our hands on, there is a small aluminum cooler with a moderately sized fan. On top of the cooler is just a plastic facade for the aesthetics. This active cooler dissipates heat from both the GPU and the DDR2 video memory. This video card has 1GB of DDR2 memory.

The heatsink doesn't cover the entire PCB, but around it is additional power circuitry, the 2-pin fan header and the HDMI pass through audio header. Due to the lower power requirements of this graphics card, no external PCI Express power connector is required. This graphics card also does support NVIDIA's SLI technology, but this time no internal bridge is needed. On the opposite side of the graphics card's PCB is prominently just the single four screws that hold the aluminum heatsink in place. The DDR2 video memory is all located on the main side of the graphics card so there really isn't much else to note.

The Sparkle GeForce 9500 GT 1GB was a fair performer. It's significantly faster than its previous generation sibling, the GeForce 8500 GT, but it was left running much slower than the next step-up, the GeForce 9600 GT. In all of the gaming tests, the frame rates for the GeForce 9500 GT were playable but just not as good as the GeForce 9600 GT. Running the graphics card at its overclocked state of 588/980MHz had resulted in a few percent improvement. Aside from the frame rate and timed performance, the Sparkle GeForce 9500 GT was fine when it came to the noise level and operating temperature.

What distinguishes the Sparkle GeForce 9500 GT card from some of the other similarly marked graphics cards is that this model has DisplayPort and HDMI outputs in addition to its DVI connector, which makes it ideal for a media PC. The NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT exhibited no problems when using the binary driver on Linux. All in all, it's a nice affordable graphics card.