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Sparkle GeForce 8500 outfitted with PCI interface (yes; old PCI)

by Tarinder Sandhu on 6 June 2007, 18:34

Tags: Sparkle

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Computex 2007


Take a look at the passively-cooled graphics card, shown above, and what do you think stands out?

We can tell you that it's a Sparkle GeForce 8500 GT. You can probably discern that much by the lettering on the PCB. Nothing wholly surprising there.

Now, take a look at the interface. It's not PCI-Express or, for that matter, AGP.

Veteran PC users will recognise the PCI interface.

[advert]So why such a bandwidth-limited interface on a modern-day Ā£60 graphics card? Sparkle's representatives pointed out that the SKU exists to serve a market where neither faster interconnect is available - certain servers, for example. Indeed, the protocol conversion is an interesting topic in itself.

Performance, obviously, will take a hit compared to full-bandwidth PCIe, but we can see the appeal, even though it lies within a niche market.





HEXUS Forums :: 5 Comments

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Cards like this always come in handy when running third or forth monitors. There's not much performance in that area for people wanting to run anything intensive on those monitors. It is a niche market, but there's certainly some demand for these cards. It should be good for letting Sims 2 run on an old Family Dell box too.
That certainly is good news for me. I have a DELL PC with only PCI slots.

At the moment I am using 6200 on that one.

Till today, I knew that X1300 ( by some Chinese manufacturer) , which costs $160 is the best card available for PCI.
This is great news :)
Its nearly impossible nowadays to find relatively inexpencive pci graphics cards based on modern graphics chipsets, and many older agp mainboards wont support current agp graphics cards.
This card provides some nice features for those older platforms. Also makes a nice (low power consumption/passive cooling) addition to single slot pci-e/agp systems.
3D performance is not an issue here.
I really want one of these for a media centre project based on a Via board. It's the only way to get full HDTV decoding of H.264 video on the C7.

Anyone know if they are available? I have not been able to find anywhere selling them, and it's nearly impossible to search for “pci” on Google. Sparkle are not listing them on their web site any more.
mojo-chan
I really want one of these for a media centre project based on a Via board. It's the only way to get full HDTV decoding of H.264 video on the C7.

Anyone know if they are available? I have not been able to find anywhere selling them, and it's nearly impossible to search for “pci” on Google. Sparkle are not listing them on their web site any more.

strange i thouth google had evrything