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Sparkle launches Calibre X265 - GeForce GTX 260 with all-new cooling

by Parm Mann on 15 June 2009, 10:16

Tags: Calibre X265, Sparkle

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We always enjoy seeing products emerge from Taiwan's Sparkle Computer Company as they tend to be a little different from the rest. Earlier this month at COMPUTEX it lived up to that reputation by unveiling its stackable NVIDIA ION PC and its transforming Calibre IDF Dual Fly cooling system.

Today, it's launching a new graphics card - the Sparkle Calibre X265 - and it claims to be the world's first to feature pillars traversed cooling fins technology.

The 55nm card, pictured above, looks formidable but is something of a jack of all trades. Sparkle ships the card with its in-house-designed SPA Tune overclocking software - a solution that allows users to run the card in Green, Standard or Overclock modes, each of which provides the following frequencies at the touch of a button:

  Green Standard Overclock
GPU clock 400MHz 576MHz 666MHz
Memory clock 600MHz 1,998MHz 2,268MHz
Shader clock 800MHz 1,242MHz 1,476MHz

The toned-down Green mode lives to serve the purpose of saving power, and the Standard mode simply matches NVIDIA's reference specifications for a GeForce GTX 260. Overclock, however, notably raises the bar and should be quick enough, we reckon, to put Sparkle's card comfortably into GeForce GTX 275 territory.

How does Sparkle keep the card cool at those frequencies? With a monster cooling solution, of course.

The Calibre X265 features an aluminium thermal base, four direct-touch heatpipes (two 6mm and two 8mm), nine aluminium pillars traversed heatsinks (pictured above) and a pair of cooling fans, too.

We've yet to try it for ourselves, but Sparkle reckons "the perfect combination of the heat pipes and the pillars traversed cooling fins technology provides superior cooling efficiency and greatly enhances the cooling performance of GPU, video memory, MOS circuit and NVIO on the PCB."

There's no mention of pricing yet, but Sparkle might be hard pushed to compete with falling GeForce GTX 275 prices. The Calibre X265 will need to be under the Ā£200 mark to make any real sense, we reckon.



HEXUS Forums :: 3 Comments

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Sounds like an interesting card, I particularly like the sound of green mode. It bugs the bejesus out of me to think how much juice my GPU is sucking down and not using when I am surfing the web, watching videos e.t.c. (well thats assuming green mode actually makes a significant dent in the cards draw).

Hope you have one of these cards winging its way to your labs for testing, would love to see the figures on it in all 3 modes, and the usability of green.
ditto - would be interested to hear more, including power savings to be made in green mode and framerates in all modes.

also, where do you set the speed? In software? Can't see a physical button on the back of the card…
cordas
Sounds like an interesting card, I particularly like the sound of green mode. It bugs the bejesus out of me to think how much juice my GPU is sucking down and not using when I am surfing the web, watching videos e.t.c. (well thats assuming green mode actually makes a significant dent in the cards draw).

Hope you have one of these cards winging its way to your labs for testing, would love to see the figures on it in all 3 modes, and the usability of green.

Cards go to 2d speeds on desktop and such, with clock speed of around 100Mhz or so with 300Mhz memory :P