Introduction
Sparkle Computer might sound very familiar for most visitors. Sparkle was established in 1981, Taiwan. Sparkle is a company with endless energy, vitality and a management of unmatched ingenuity and dedication. Sparkle respects individualism, insists on highest quality, cares about the natural environment and serves its customers with the highest regard. These principles have already penetrated into every corner of the company, motivating Sparkle and its industry peers toward their leadership positions all the way into the next century. To achieve their goal, Sparkle only applies the newest and most advanced graphics card technologies to its products, offers them to the market at reasonable prices and keeps a keen eye on consumer needs in the real world. With the Calibre style they go even further and bring some superior products on the market.
Right on, the GeForce 8800 series have stirred up the market and has yet to come across some competition. Since the introduction of the GeForce 8800 series the world of DirectX 10 is there for us to take. Indeed NVIDIA was the first to come up with a solution that fully support the DirectX 10 specifications and that is fully compatible with Windows Vista. At the launch day two cards have been introduced, the GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS, and both feature the long awaited G80 graphics core. Sparkle actually had their card ready from the first day, although all just following the reference design. But that has changed with the Calibre edition, as now some tweaked version of the GeForce 8800 series are available which come with some improved cooling solution and higher clock speed settings. With the Calibre series the goal is to build a faster, though cooler card with a firm boost in performance.
When looking back some months, none of the card came any different from the reference design except the sticker that came on the standard cooling system. However after the first month of 2007 that all changed when NVIDIA finally dropped their non-overclocking policy. At that point some of the well known brands released their first pre-overclocked GeForce 8800 series. And as you can see also Sparkle couldn’t just stay behind and released their Calibre series based upon the GeForce 8800 series and also changed the cooling solution at the same time. In fact Sparkle teamed up with MACS Technology who made an active cooling consisting of a TEC module with heatpipes. Now it was just up to Sparkle to fit both together and the Calibre 8800 GTX OC edition was born.
Main Features
- GeForce 8800 GTX (G80 at 630MHz)
- 768MB 384-bit GDDR3 Memory (1960MHz)
- High-speed 384-bit Memory Interface
- Memory Bandwidth of 94.0GB/s
- PCI Express x16 Compatibility
- High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection
- H.264 Playback with PureVideo Engine
- Multi-GPU SLI Bridge Interconnect Support
- DVI-I Connector for Analog/Digital Display
- High Performance TEC Cooling Solution
Looking back at the G70 core we could say it was rather a more powerful and enhanced NV45 chip with more vertex and pixel shader units to tune up the gaming performance. With the introduction of the G80 chips this is completely different. The G80 core is a completely new design dedicated to the unified shader environment that the new DirectX 10 has somehow enforced. But what does that mean? Well in essence you can’t speak about fixed vertex, pixel or texture units but these are now combined in what NVIDIA calls stream processors. These stream processors can either be used as pixel or vertex shaders, which means variable depending on the needs.
With the Calibre series, Sparkle wants to make a difference and show their superior product range. In that light the box can’t just be a standard layout but should stand out in the crowd. The box itself details very clearly the product that you are buying as well as the main features, that it is a PCI Express card with high performance GDDR3 memory. The black box does make quite an impression and does catch our eye quite easily. Well, somehow that isn’t that strange as it comes with some shiny squares that reflect the light and doing draws you attention towards it. Nonetheless the box is well designed and the back clearly states all the features, with the most important one being the first DirectX 10 capable graphics accelerator.
As we already mentioned this isn’t just a reference design but rather a customized version build around the reference PCB from NVIDIA. The first version of the GeForce 8800 series all come from the same production and each of the brands puts their own colors and logo on it. These cards are bigger than the previous GeForce 7900 series with the actual PCB almost completely hidden away behind the dual slot cooling solution. Peeking out at the bottom we see the PCI Express interface connection. The difference with the reference design is mainly the cooling solution. On top of the cooling solution you can find the Calibre name, which is actually a sticker put on the surface.
The rear view is quite sober and resembles to the GeForce 7900 series; with the very typical green colored PCB and screws that hold the cooling. It does show all the details off the PCB, with none of the parts being covered. Some stickers are placed on the back to provide the model details, raw specifications and the serial number. The GeForce 8800 GTX accelerator is HDCP compatible, something that has become very quickly a standard with Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are on their way. That means you can rest assured that the Sparkle Calibre 8800 GTX should be able to play back HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies when used with the right player software.