Q1 2004 Vendor Graphics Card Roundup

Sparkle Computer

At first glance, anyone would think that these were pure reference cards with a little gold trim, but further inspection tells us that there was a little more tender loving care than meets the eye here. Both of the Sparkle cards that we tested are clocked above reference from the factory.

Sparkle Platinum GeForce FX 5950 Ultra

This card comes at the same 500/1000 speed that the Gainward Golden Sample ships with. This card had no problems handling itself at those speeds though. Unfortunately, we weren't able to get the core clock very high. If we dropped the memory clock way down, we could hit much higher speeds in the core, but bringing the memory back up to a speed that it could previously hit had no longer worked.

It could very well be a heat issue, as this is a pretty warm card, and increasing the core clock speed may be getting the memory not to function at a 1GHz data rate.

Sparkle Platinum GeForce FX 5700 Ultra

This card was also clocked higher than stock and was able to hit the highest memory speed that we saw with a 5700 Ultra (which was already very high).

Sparkle had a couple of nice products with their Platinum line, and hopefully they will extend their innovation to include some custom cooling in upcoming products.