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Sparkle Calibre GeForce 9600 GT |
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Written by Nebojsa Todorovic
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Wednesday, 28 May 2008 |
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Page 1 of 2  Factory overclocked graphics cards are not novelty anymore. It’s become more and more frequent practice that manufacturers launch parallel models with clocks determined by nVidia or ATI, and models with (more or less) raised clocks. It happens very often that factory overclocked graphics card reach maximum clock at lower value than “default” card would. So, that whole situation starts being not so interesting. But, things are never bad as they seem, and Sparkle Calibre 9600GT breaks the monotony.
First thing we spotted was package. Huge silver logo and unicorn motive, spread all over the box that looks like Ferrari’s logo. If we want to judge only by exterior of the box, we would say that this must be something worth of our attention. Inside the package was standard stuff like: manual, cables, disc with drivers and of course, Calibre card itself. These sorts of cards are essence that only cards from special selection had. These special specimens stood out from the crowd, just like Sparkle Calibre 9600GT does these days. At first sight, cooling solution looks like it’s meant for high class models. It represents the combination of copper and aluminum base with two heatpipes that are integrated into two separated circle shaped thermal dissipation aluminum elements. Fan is placed above each of these two separated elements. These two extra cooling profiles can be set up to 30° angle. GeForce 9600 GT unfolded in that manner looks very impressive and you should be prepared to forget about two neighboring slots on motherboard if you intend to leave it in that configuration.
Card will work flawlessly even when it’s folded, but efficiency of fans will be reduced and that will result in slightly higher working temperatures. So if you plan overclock of this card further, we suggest that you keep thermal dissipation elements with fans elevated. Nevertheless this is one of the prettiest cooling solutions for GeForce 9600GT that we seen so far, and in combination with black PCB, transform this card in unforgettable visual experience.
Off course this is still graphics card based on GeForce 9600GT. This implies: G94 chip with 64 Stream Processors, 16 ROP and 32 texture units. Memory bandwidth is 256-bit wide, and there is 512 MB GDDR3 memory on card, consisted of eight chips with 1ns response time. Clocks are slightly elevated: 700MHz for GPU itself, 1850MHz for Stream Processors and 2GHz for memory.
This card, above all, stands out with its overclocking possibilities. This is absolutely the best specimen that was in our test lab so far. With air cooled solution mounted on this card we achieved very respectable 830MHz for GPU and 2150MHz for Stream Processors. Memory also performed very well and reached 2180MHz. Under these conditions, temperatures never reached dangerous levels and were always under 65 Centigrade (149 Fahrenheit). Sparkle Calibre GeForce 9600 GT overclocked this way brought 20% increase in performances which is a result worth a mention.
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