Review: Sparkle SP7000 GeForce 3

 


UK RRP £199.00 Inc V.A.T

Sparkle are becoming more well known within the consumer graphics industry, they produce a massive array of graphics cards  for the PC industry, ranging from basic 4MB PCI cards right the way up to the 64MB GeForce3.  The Sparkle  GeForce3  has been around for a while now and is probably one of the cheapest GeForce3's available.  It follows the Nvidia reference design to the letter, running at default GeForce3 clock speeds of 200MHz core 460MHz memory. The card has a green PCB and green heatsink's,  it doesn't grab your attention like some cards around at the moment,  but in the end it is the performance that counts. A quick look on the Sparkle website shows a much  funkier looking heatsink arrangement than on the card pictured there. The Sparkle GeForce3 comes comes bundled with the full version of PowerDVD, Driver CD v12.41 and of course a user's manual. It is equipped with all the usual connectors, TV out and the DVI interface which nowadays is becoming more widely used. The product is backed up by a unique 1 year end user warranty and free web support.

Specifications

Test Rig

Athlon Thunderbird @1600MHz (12*266MHz)
Epox 8K7A + 
256MB Crucial PC2100 DDR RAM
Sparkle GeForce3 64MB
SoundBlaster Live 1024
Windows 98SE with NVidia Detonator 21.83 Drivers

Benchmarks

For benchmarking I updated the driver's that came with this card to the newer Nvidia Detonator drivers v21.83


3DMark 2001

This is the standard benchmark you see everywhere on the internet and in PC magazine's nowadays. I have included all the current resolutions including 1600x1200 as  games are becoming more playable at this very high resolution. 

At 1024x768x32 the Sparkle GF3 scores 7026 3dmarks which is on par with most of the GF3 flavour's available today.

Unreal Tournament

I've included UT as I just love the game and its still very popular in the gaming world, although it doesn't really serve much purpose as it is so heavily CPU dependant as you can see from the results below.  The FPS barely changes  from the lowest to the highest resolution. 

Quake3

This is the good old favorite graphics benchmark, I'm using the old version 1.17 Quake patch, so that I can use the standard timedemo001.dm3  demo. As always I've run the game with a variety of settings. EHQ is with the graphics settings maxed out with full eye candy. At 1600*1200 resolution the FPS  creeps down to under 100FPS, showing just how much Quake 3 needs the memory bandwidth.  Later in the over-clocking section you can see just what a difference the extra memory bandwidth makes.

Overclocking

Besides the features on the card the main thing that separates one GeForce3 from another is the overclocking ability of it. Looking at the heatsinks on the Sparkle card they didn't exactly fill me with confidence in terms of overclocking ability,  but the only way  is to try it out.  I installed the well known 'Coolbits' registry file to allow overclocking of the core and memory. I quickly moved this up a few notches and ran a loop of 3DMark 2001 to test stability. After a few loops of 3DMark, I got up to a an amazing 250MHz core 575MHz memory.  This is above the core speed of the newer GeForce3 Ti500's and the memory speed is way above the default setting of 500MHz for a GF3Ti 500. 
  

Overclocked Benchmarks

I ran all the benchmarks again with the card clocked at 250MHz core 575MHz memory as shown above.

Since the Sparkle GF3 overclocked so well, lets see what it means in terms of performance gain.

3DMark 2001

This shows quite a large performance gain over the default core and memory speed. At 1024x768x32 resolution this reflects a 12% performance increase.

Unreal Tournament

Not much of a difference here at all less than  1FPS difference,  truly showing that this game is very CPU speed dependant!

Quake3

I've decided to show the Quake3 results using just the Extra High Quality (EHQ) settings, this is with the sliders set to maximum quality. In the higher resolutions there are some very impressive gains in performance, below 1024x768 there really isn't much difference though. Its the higher resolutions that matter anyway because in the lower resolutions a GeForce3 running at default speed does the job very well anyway!

Conclusion

The Sparkle SP7000 GeForce3  ran everything I threw at it flawlessly and performed very well. The card's looks are a little tame when compared with some of the funkier looking GeForce3's around, but as I said before its the performance that counts and this card certainly has plenty of that. The standard GeForce3 GPU is being phased out at the moment to be replaced the GeForce3 Ti500 and Ti200 cards, so there may well be some cheaper deals on them at the moment, so if your'e after a powerful graphics card that won't burn a huge hole in your pocket go out and grab one now!