With the winter holiday season approaching people are looking for new products to put under the Christmas tree. With the economic recession in full force a new video card which costs less than $200 might be more feasible this year. We have tested a GeForce 9800 GTX in the past from Gainward, and the revised GTX+ increases the shader and GPU clocks to give the card a fighting chance below the $200 price point. This is certainly a good step, to battle the recent great products from ATI which do well in this segment. In time for holiday shopping spree Sparkle launches a custom GeForce 9800 GTX+ which features onboard HDMI and a silent cooling. Can it run the latest games fluently? - Madshrimps

Sparkle GeForce 9800 GTX+ Custom Cooling Preview

Actually the original 9800 GTX didn't quite live up to its product name, seeing as the older GeForce 8800 GTX was able to keep up with it nicely, thanks to its 384-bit memory bus and larger memory size. Sparkle uses a custom designed PCB and GPU cooling, they also integrated native HDMI onboard. The packaging is a standard affair, front reveals a nice Sparkle logo with clear specifications at the top. The rear part of the box goes more in-depth regarding the GeForce 9800 series features. And inside you will find the usual suspects, with naturally the GeForce 9800 GTX+ edition from Sparkle being the main part.

The cooling heatsink is made from aluminum with a shroud featuring Sparkle logo. One single fan in the middle pushes cool air over the fins. This is a dual slot solution so make sure you have room for it. Also open up a PCI slot at the back of your case to allow the hot air to escape. Sparkle kept the SLI connectors on the PCB so 3-way SLI is possible with these cards. The rear doesn't reveal so much, a proper mounting bracket for the GPU cooling makes sure it won't fall of by accident. This is quite standard these days to keep the cooling solution firmly attached and to strenghten the PCB as such at the same time.

The Sparkle GeForce 9800 GTX+ card did quite well in our games tested today, overall it proved about fifteen percent faster than the previous generation high-end GeForce 8800 GTX, and luckily it doesn't come with a very high price tag. We spotted it for around $180, and amongst other GeForce 9800 GTX+ offerings the Sparkle is very sharply priced. The direct competitor for the GTX+ version is an overclocked Radeon HD 4850 512MB card, while a reference clocked Radeon HD 4850 is noticeably cheaper it's also slower than the new GeForce 9800 GTX+ edition. In that aspect NVIDIA has just done what was needed, to turn the table.

The factory overclocked Radeon HD 4850 starts at around $200 making it more expensive than the card tested. There's no denying that the current GeForce 9800 GTX+ pricing seen is thanks to the ATI's aggressive pricing. Until we've had an opportunity to put an overclocked Radeon HD 4850 against the GTX+ we can't draw final conclusion, what we can say though is that the Sparkle GeForce 9800 GTX+ is a very capable graphics card able to run the latest games fluently at relatively high resolutions. Sparkle's custom version adds a capable cooling and native HDMI support which makes it quite future proof.

If you hunger for more they also have a Calibre version which comes with higher clock speeds. Whether you'll find an ATI or NVIDIA based video card under the Christmas tree this year, you can be assured that it will run the best games out there at high detail, without ruining your budget.