We always enjoy seeing products emerge from Taiwan's Sparkle Computer Company as they tend to be a little different from the rest. Earlier this month at COMPUTEX it lived up to that reputation by unveiling its stackable NVIDIA ION PC and its transforming Calibre IDF Dual Fly cooling system.
Today, it's launching a new graphics card - the Sparkle Calibre X265 - and it claims to be the world's first to feature pillars traversed cooling fins technology.
The 55nm card, pictured above, looks formidable but is something of a jack of all trades. Sparkle ships the card with its in-house-designed SPA Tune overclocking software - a solution that allows users to run the card in Green, Standard or Overclock modes, each of which provides the following frequencies at the touch of a button:
| Green | Standard | Overclock | |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPU clock | 400MHz | 576MHz | 666MHz |
| Memory clock | 600MHz | 1,998MHz | 2,268MHz |
| Shader clock | 800MHz | 1,242MHz | 1,476MHz |
The toned-down Green mode lives to serve the purpose of saving power, and the Standard mode simply matches NVIDIA's reference specifications for a GeForce GTX 260. Overclock, however, notably raises the bar and should be quick enough, we reckon, to put Sparkle's card comfortably into GeForce GTX 275 territory.
How does Sparkle keep the card cool at those frequencies? With a monster cooling solution, of course.
The Calibre X265 features an aluminium thermal base, four direct-touch heatpipes (two 6mm and two 8mm), nine aluminium pillars traversed heatsinks (pictured above) and a pair of cooling fans, too.
We've yet to try it for ourselves, but Sparkle reckons "the perfect combination of the heat pipes and the pillars traversed cooling fins technology provides superior cooling efficiency and greatly enhances the cooling performance of GPU, video memory, MOS circuit and NVIO on the PCB."
There's no mention of pricing yet, but Sparkle might be hard pushed to compete with falling GeForce GTX 275 prices. The Calibre X265 will need to be under the £200 mark to make any real sense, we reckon.
