Sparkle has been talking up its low-profile GeForce GTS 250 since the tail end of 2009, but the card has since filtered through to retail and Sparkle has been quick to remind the HTPC crowd that this here card could be the answer you've been looking for.
Riding on the success of Hollywood blockbuster Avatar, Sparkle reckons its low-profile GTS 250 can bring a "vivid Avatar experience" your living room.
It's talking up the card's A/V credentials, of course, and users can look forward to hardware-accelerated video playback courtesy of NVIDIA's PureVideo HD technology, as well as a choice of HDMI or DVI output.
Readers might remember the GeForce GTS 250 as a rebranded GeForce 9800 GTX - and you'd be right - but Sparkle's low-profile implementation results in a small loss in overall performance. There's no support for SLI, and the card's GPU is downclocked from 738MHz to 600MHz. The 128 shaders take a hit, too, falling from 1,836MHz to 1,500MHz.
Memory choices, meanwhile, are 512MB of GDDR3 clocked at 1,600MHz or 1GB of GDDR3 clocked at 1,800MHz.
A useful all-rounder for a low-profile HTPC, we reckon, but there are a few provisos worth pointing out. The card requires a six-pin power connector - which may or may not be present in a low-power HTPC - and it's cooled by a small fan which is highly unlikely to be silent.
Nonetheless, if you've always wanted a GeForce GTS 250 in your low-profile HTPC, this is the way to do it. Sparkle's card is available from cclonline.com priced at around £91 for the 512MB model and £105 for the 1GB variety.
And yes, we sympathise with the language barrier facing Taiwanese companies, but the "low porfile" promotional image did make us chuckle.
