I'm very impressed with how the circular fins, like people used to use in the good old days (I have a 5200 with this design), is suddenly an improvement over ducting the air out of the case. The ability to blow air off the bottom of the card is particularly clever, given that there's a motherboard in the way of the airflow - perhaps it ships with a drill for making holes?

I'm a little bitter. The entire reason my current rig is water cooled is that the 6800 vintage nVidia cards blow air from the rear of the case to the front, setting up a nice little loop of warm air when combined with all the case fans which are blowing the other way. I rejoiced that they got their act together and started ducting air out the back.

The Sparkle board looks like a two slot solution (even though it only has one backplate). If that's not just a misleading picture, I can't see how dumping 100W inside the case from the 9600 is going to be better than conventionally shuffling the hot air out of the way, no matter how nominally novel the fan design.

Interesting choice of 1GB, although I think they're over-selling its capabilities a bit (if this card could run anything at full whack, nobody would sell 8800GTs). I'd be happier with a 1GB 9800GTX - or even a 768MB 9800 Ultra, if it turns out that there have been some spare pins on the memory interface this whole time.

I'm very impressed with how the circular fins, like people used to use in the good old days (I have a 5200 with this design), is suddenly an improvement over ducting the air out of the case. The ability to blow air off the bottom of the card is particularly clever, given that there's a motherboard in the way of the airflow - perhaps it ships with a drill for making holes?

I'm a little bitter. The entire reason my current rig is water cooled is that the 6800 vintage nVidia cards blow air from the rear of the case to the front, setting up a nice little loop of warm air when combined with all the case fans which are blowing the other way. I rejoiced that they got their act together and started ducting air out the back.

The Sparkle board looks like a two slot solution (even though it only has one backplate). If that's not just a misleading picture, I can't see how dumping 100W inside the case from the 9600 is going to be better than conventionally shuffling the hot air out of the way, no matter how nominally novel the fan design.

Interesting choice of 1GB, although I think they're over-selling its capabilities a bit (if this card could run anything at full whack, nobody would sell 8800GTs). I'd be happier with a 1GB 9800GTX - or even a 768MB 9800 Ultra, if it turns out that there have been some spare pins on the memory interface this whole time.

The title of the "article" (*cough*) should be "Help Sparkle help us, buy their great products!"

9600GT? Crysis? DX10? 

Easily handled?

Hmmmmmm...