Sparkle gives the G80 a cold reception

BIRTHDAYS ARE FUNNY affairs, sometimes full of surprises. My birthday this year had no surprises, it just happened to be the official birth date of Nvidia's G80, also known as GeForce 8800 (GTX the preferred variety).

By now, all is known about its Lumenex engine with unified shaders and DirectX 10 Shader 4 support, GigaThread array of 128 streaming processors, and (finally) Nvidia's own "Quantum Effects" physics acceleration, not to mention the somewhat odd 384-bit memory bus with 768 MBytes of GDDR3 RAM there, providing some 86 GB/s of bandwidth, 7x that of Athlon AM2 socket or Intel Core 2 overclocked to FSB1600. Overall, undisputably the world's fastest GPU right now, at least until DAAMIT R600 comes out in, hopefully, a few months.

Sparkle has also joined the Nvidia team fray in announcing a new G80 series of GF8800GTX and GTS cards, however, in this case, they are coming up at the very start with a (slightly) modified offering as well. There are two GeForce 8800GTX models coming out from them - one is a standard reference model, the other the high-end Calibre model with a different cooling design (see photo). Sparkle claims that the Calibre P880+ 8800GTX cooler has better cooling performance, yet lower noise than the reference design, and, once Nvidia allows G80 family overclocking, it might be of more help there, too.

Looks-wise, I'd say that the reference design is more polished, but again, the huge heat sink on the Calibre P880+, with its dual fans, gives an image of sheer power, doesn't it? But it's what is under those two fans that gives thess cards the extra oomph (once unlocked) and lower noise with cooler operation: an active Peltier Junction cooling engine, with its own 4-pin power supply (on top of the two 6-pin feeds for the card itself!). Co-developed by Sparkle and TEC, the system is second only to the best water cooling systems when it comes to the heat removal efficiency and reduced noise operation - after all, you don't want the card fan noise to overpower even the machine gun fire in your favourite 3-D shootout.

Inside the huge cooling system is a thermal electric cooler, quad heatpipes and (quite slim) dual 8cm fans. The Peltier effect uses a transducer to produce a cold source that lowers the temperature of the GF8800GTX GPU. A transistor sensor placed near the GPU detects its temperature, while software monitors the overall temperature on the video card. When a certain temperature is reached near the GPU, the transducer will turn on the cold source. When the GPU is in idle mode, the transducer will turn off automatically. The dual 8 cm fans fan push the hot air to the exterior of the card via the quad heatpipes, helping to eliminate the heat remaining in the video card system. The fans have an exhaust cover to minimise the noise.

The first sample that I got did not have any heat sinks on the 12 memory chips or the I/O chip on the graphics card. I volunteered and obtained 13 pieces of Zalman's good quality GDDR memory heat sinks and, to avoid removing the whole Peltier assembly, spent over an hour with a pincer, positioning and fixing these heat sinks on the memory chips - under the Peltier cooler! See the photo with the end result.

Now, I ran both cards on two different CPU configurations - one the Intel "Kentsfield" Core 2 QX6700 running at 3.20GHz with FSB1066, whose four cores proved useful in feeding the GPU for 3DMark06 for now at least (till some actual 4-core optimised games come out), and the old Intel "Presler" Pentium XE 965, running at 4.27GHz with its two cores, again on FSB1066. Both of these are the highest frequencies I could run these CPUs on and reliably complete the CPU portion of 3DMark06 repeatedly without a hitch, even when using Zalman 9700 high-end cooler. The CPUs were using the same platform - Intel D975XBX2 with 1GB of Corsair XMS-5400UL memory, enabling 3-2-2-7 low latency at up to around 670 MHz.

The performance was about the same - after all, Nvidia doesn't allow overclocking right now (feel free to share with us your experiences in overcoming this overclocking barrier here) and the GPU and RAM parts are the same. However, there was a definite difference in the noise. Sparkle claims to have reached over 20 deg C heat benefit (60 C working temperature instead of 80C) and 12 decibels less working noise compared to the reference card. I didn't measure the precise sound or heat levels yet, but the card was substantially quieter and, even after several rounds of 3DMark 06 with and without AA, anisotropics and so on, the huge Peltier block stayed coolish to the touch.

Also, I looked at the power consumption during the 3DMark test runs, and there was only a few watts difference between the reference card and the P880+. Few watts more for far less heat & noise, not to mention some 60 grams less card weight? I guess the deal is good, and will be very good once the overclocking is unlocked. Most importantly, neither card took more watts than the X1900XTX running at 700/1600 speed settings, for way higher performance. In all cases, the system consumption peaked at about 230Watts as measured.

In any case, these guys offer both card versions (the reference design under the Sparkle brand) and the Peltier version under the Calibre brand - also, while the Sparkle version gets the Call Of Duty 2 game CD, Calibre has the more 'unique' Painkiller game bundled along, as a full retail set.

Here are the initial 3D Mark06 results on the Kentsfield and Presler:

As you can see, this GPU really makes the difference between the CPUs, even in plain 3-D graphics. If you want to spend upwards of US$ 700 on a card like this, you better allocate a good sum for the right CPU (quad core QX6700 or QuadFather isn't a bad choice) and, of course, the right cooling and the right mainboard. Since these GPUs exert strong pressure on the CPU, PCI-E subsystem and memory bandwidth consumption, I'd never go with a dual GF8800GTX SLI configuration in a dual PCI-E X8 configuration, like say Intel 975X chipset. It simply has to be the new Nforce 680i (or, if you can make it work, one of those rare ATI RD600 chipset based boards).

Sparkle Calibre P880+ is worth checking out for any high-end "enthusiast" keen on G80 - I like the idea of a Peltier cooler on such a high end card, however I have yet to see how it will perform in long term operation. Also, trying it in SLI mode with heavily overclocked water-cooled QX6700 on the Nforce 680i, with much faster FSB and memory system to feed the twin G80's, would be tempting. But well, that is for next week. ?