Sparkle 8800GT: silent and comfortable

We start our today's review of Sparkle 8800GT with defining priorities as to what we want to find out. If we look at the main character of today's review from the viewpoint of the speed characteristics, there is nothing new, or almost nothing, about it. Because Sparkle 8800GT is of the reference design with the only difference in color. On the other hand, the cooling system has proved to be the major trump of the new product, but at first glance it may scare some potential buyers away. The thing is that absolutely all modern video cards offer quite high heat emission and therefore heat up immensely. Certainly, all becomes known through comparison, so in various reviews we can come across comments like "the chip has proved to be quite cool", but that doesn't at all mean it is cold. The same can be said about the G92 chip as well, on which all GeForce 8800GT video cards are based. As compared to the predecessor G80, the new chip has turned more economical in terms of power consumption and thus emits less heat. However, video cards on its base sometimes heat immensely, and many may ask the reasonable question: how will a passive cooling system cope with the job it is to do? Indeed, the question is really topical - there have been so many times that passive systems were simply unable to do their job! It has often happened that the fastening of not the lightest cooling systems was not adequate to their weight, in the end they departed from cooled items, that is, GPU and memory chips, which resulted in their overheating and sometimes failure. So, what is the passive cooling system installed on Sparkle 8800GT video cards like? Does it suffer from its former flaws, have they been eliminated and can it be used safely? To give the answer to this question is just the purpose of our review, and we traditionally start our examination of Sparkle 8800GT with the package.

The package of Sparkle 8800GT is of rather strict shape, with the letter “S” carved over the center relaxing the perception. You can see the video card through the notches.

There is nothing interesting on the reverse side of the box. The only thing what is there is standard praises and consistent information.

The package bundle of the video card does not stand out with abundance and contains only the most needed items:

• power supply adapter for PCI-Express video cards;
• S-Video connection cable;
• s-video>component out splitter;
• DVI>D-sub adapter;
• CD with drivers and utilities, user's manual.

On the one hand, it is sad that the manufacturer has not put one or two games into the bundle; on the other hand, it is nice that you pay only for the video card and not varied and unneeded "added bonuses".

You can somehow estimate the card after the first glance. The first and most important thing is that the radiator, using three heat pipes, is brought over to the reverse side of the video card, that is, on top of the already installed video card. We have already examined a solution like that and were really pleased, because it demonstrated its exceptional efficiency. At last, video card manufacturers have finally come to their senses and stopped ignoring the energy conservation law when producing passive cooling systems. The thing, however big and nice the cooling system may be, heat must be rejected from it. Air is the only heat conductor in the air medium, so even the passive cooling system should be cooled with air. But how can that be if there is no fan on? Due to the positioning of the radiator on top, it is blown by air from the CPU cooler, with the rejected heat not heating the video card for the second time. But as you must have understood, it's better not to leave such a video card without blowing.

The radiator is assembled of large aluminum sheets threaded on the heat pipes. Owing to the dimensions and quite a wide gap between the fins, it is well blown and therefore should yield heat well. Anyway, let's take a closer look.

The cooling system is light enough because all the parts except the heat pipes are made of aluminum. Of course, you can reproach the manufacturer - why not to use copper because it offers better heat conductivity and greater specific heat? However, use of aluminum allowed to get smaller weight, which is good. Anyway, we'll judge about the efficiency of the cooling system on the base of tests, but for now we are going on to explore its design.

Having removed the black housing with a Sparkle logo, you can see that the heat pipes are glued to the aluminum plate which acts as a heat spreader. The manufacturer chose quite an ambiguous method for fastening the heat pipes, however, we found nothing to complain about.

The PCB is made following the reference design. The G92 chip positioned in the center is surrounded by eight DDR3 memory chips that form 512 MB of video memory. The blue stickers on the memory chips are heat-conductive washers to contact the radiator.

The memory is made by Qimonda and offers 1.0 ns access time, which is equivalent to 2000 MHz (1000 MHz DDR).

The reverse side of the video card also follows the reference design and doesn't stand out with anything. It is now high time we checked the efficiency of the cooling system in action, and try the video card for overclocking.

Efficiency of the cooling system and overclocking

We'll be checking the cooling efficiency in three modes using the game Oblivion with the quality settings set to the maximum. The first mode – Sparkle 8800GT + a slow 120 mm fan.

Such a union of the cooling system and the slow fan should be highly efficient and quiet at the same time, which the reference cooling system can't boast.

Fantastic result! The temperature did not rise higher than 56 C with the relative quietness preserved, which allows not only not only safely operating the video card even in hot summer but also overclocking it. Now let's see how the cooling system will cope with its job without a fan.

The video card warmed up to 86 C, which is high enough and not so much for the passive cooling system. At the same time, even the reference cooling system for GeForce 8800GT sometimes does a worse job, so even the passive cooling system by Sparkle has done a much better job. We are now creating the worst conditions for cooling the video card,

and see if the cooling system copes with its job. To that end, we separated the air flow from the cooler with a paper pack and at the same we blocked heat rejection from the video card's radiator.

The maximum heating amounted to merely 106 C, so the passive cooling system deserves the highest of the praises! On the other hand, the conditions are extreme, so it's better to avoid immense heating.

A couple of words on the overclocking. Sparkle 8800GT was able to conquer the frequencies 740/1800/2000 MHz, which is about the same as it is in the GeForce 8800GT which has been to our lab before.

Benchmarking and conclusions

We'll be testing Sparkle 8800GT with the already familiar test bench and the familiar kit of tests:

We'll be comparing the video card in question versus its direct competitor – Radeon HD3870 and the weaker Radeon HD3850. For Sparkle 8800GT, we used 169.21 drivers for Windows XP and 169.25 for Windows Vista; for Radeon video cards - we used Catalyst 7.12 for both the operating systems. Traditionally, we start examining the results with 3DMark tests.

At this test, Sparkle 8800GT showed the best results, however the remaining participants have not lagged much behind it. As we already stated, 3D Mark tests are not the final verdict, so we are now moving on to the gaming tests which we ran using 4x FSAA and 16x AF.

At Call of Duty 4, the video card by Sparkle has demonstrated the best results and passed by their rivals substantially.

At Call of Juarez, the situation is the same and Sparkle 8800GT takes a lead over the competitors.

At Call of Juarez in the DX10 mode, the struggle is getting acute since at 1024x768 and 1280x1024 there is a twofold gap between the rivals. However, at 1600x1200 the Sparkle 8800GT lacked video memory. As a result, it started using random access memory as an addition to the video memory, and because of its lower speed in lost much in terms of speed. On the other hand, we do not rule out hackneyed blunders in the drivers.

At Crysis, Sparkle 8800GT again takes a lead. In fact, the game is merciless to all the participants of tests.

At Crysis in the DX10 mode, the alignment of forces remains unchanged, and Sparkle 8800GT takes a lead.

At Need for Speed Carbon, the Sparkle 8800GT takes a lead…

and also at Need for Speed Pro Street Racing

At Oblivion, the leader is again the video card by Sparkle.

At Prey, the leadership of Sparkle 8800GT is not so evident, and as the resolutions go up, the results produced by rivals become closer. Such a situation is caused by strong dependence of Prey on the speed of the video memory subsystem, and the speed is about the same in the contenders' solutions.

Final Words

The new product by Sparkle will be up to the mark for those who value the quietness but at the same time don't mind play a favorite game for an hour or two. In terms of the speed characteristics, we see quite a regular and absolutely noiseless GeForce 8800GT. Recommended!