- Wednesday, 10 February 2010
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The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything - Edward John Phelps
8800GT 1GB STFU Edition emerges
SPARKLE IS causing a twinkle in HTPC’ers eyes by announcing its new Sparkle GeForce 8800GT 1GB Cool-pipe 3 graphics card.
According to the company, it will be releasing this 8800GT card with (as the name implies) 1GB of DDR3 memory and the passive cooling system known as Cool Pipe 3. They didn’t cut on the clocks you'll note. The passively-cooled 8800GT will maintain the 600MHz core clock / 1.8GHz DDR3 / 1.5GHz shader spec from Nvidia, much to the joy of gamers everywhere. Sparkle also claims that this 1GB beast is backward compatible with “the original PCI Express standard”. We haven’t seen anyone actually sticking a G92 card in a PCIe 1.0 or 1.1 slot, but it makes for an appealing selling point for upgraders.
As of late, considerable effort (and ingenuity in this case) is being put into cooling down those little 8800GT’s. The reference design that world+dog is using has seen more than its usual share of complaints – reportedly the fans operate at lower-than-average speeds, thus overheating and crashing many a game. XFX and eVGA have already come forward with modified BIOS’ to allow better control over the fan (you'll find them on their supporting sites).
In this approach, Sparkle has also managed to keep the card’s cooling system limited to single slot, which can be a Godsend for users that will surely try to fit a couple of these beasties into their rigs. It does however throw the main dissipation fins to the back of the card. We imagine the thermals on this thing will be on the threshold, or maybe not, let’s wait for a sample to reach us...
No pricing for the Sparkly One right now, but there are also 256MB and 512MB versions of the card available. A 512MB version, on sale in Europe, retails at around €250. µ
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Actually, I do have a 8800GT stuck into a PCIe 1.1 slot, since I do not own a X38 nor any fancy nForce 7xx or other future products.
LOL! Love the biting humour. Not just here but in many other stories too... namaste
Why is it strange that the cooling solution moves the heat to the back of the card? Isn't it stranger that in a normal tower case in the upright position (and most are) that the heat usually rises through the card from the fan side to the backside? A lot of the heat is trapped on the underside of a tower case GPU, fans be damned. We need to design a motherboard and/or GPU layout that puts the GPU chip on the top side. Heat tends to rise, and trapping it under the card is a poor design that has been tolerated for too long.
I'd say this card is for anything *but* an HTPC. HTPCs are usually built around mATX-size enclosures, which are pretty hard to cool as it is. Throw in a passively cooled high performance graphics card and you have the recipe for a meltdown ...literally. :)
I searched the EVGA website looking for the updates so that I could tweak my video card's fan speed but couldn't find it anywhere. Could you provide a link somewhere?

Thanks,

-Mark

Merry Xmas
Please, just a couple of minutes research even if you have no idea about the topic you are writing the article about...

"We haven’t seen anyone actually sticking a G92 card in a PCIe 1.0 or 1.1 slot, but it makes for an appealing selling point for upgraders."

Have a look at the marketshare split between PCIe 1.1 and 2.0
I want two in SLI under x64. It is good to see manufacturers understand what customers want.

Oh, and twelve points for calling it the STFU edition.
I just ordered a 8800GT with 1024mb of vram for only 244€. Very nice deal.

http://www.mylemon.at/artikel,nr,93365,PALIT,Geforce_8800GT_1024MB_Super_DDR3.htm

thank you geizhals