Sparkle 8800 GT Passive: The Fastest Silent GPU in the World
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 29, 2007 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Once again, Crysis was our benchmark of choice as it seems to put the greatest stress on GPUs. We played for hours on end until the GPU temperature leveled off, using nTune to monitor temperature levels from the GPU's on-die thermal diode. Note that playing Crysis actually got these GPUs hotter than looping the 3DMark '06 HDR/SM3 tests, although only by 1 - 2C.
Interestingly enough, at idle, both the stock 8800 GT with its fan and the Sparkle passive card reach about 76C. The only explanation is that the 8800 GT's fan is designed to remain as quiet as possible, so it doesn't actually do all that much cooling when the GPU isn't being stressed.
Running Crysis, the stock 8800 GT's GPU peaks at around 94C with the two 80mm case fans in the system unplugged. The passively cooled Sparkle in the same situation is already at 111C, an increase of 17C, not nearly as much as we honestly expected but still quite hot.
Turning the case fans on drops the GPU temperature to 106C, showing that airflow in the chassis is important.
The impact on CPU temperature was actually marginal, the hottest of the four cores of the QX9770 only saw a 3C increase in core temperature.
Despite our best efforts, the Sparkle 8800 GT Passive prevailed, although posting some worryingly high GPU temperatures the card never crashed during our tests.
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FrankM - Friday, November 30, 2007 - link
The testers should be imprisoned for hardware cruelty; and the poor, deeply hurt card should be taken to a loving family where it will be taken better care of - *hint* I have waterblocks! And cookies! :DFlame on :D
Ender17 - Friday, November 30, 2007 - link
What's the big deal? This is just a cheap rip off of the Thermalright HR-03 heatsink. I've been running my 8800GTS passive for the past 6 months.j00k - Friday, November 30, 2007 - link
i'm sure all someone has to do now is make a much better passive heatsink and that'll blow this POS sparkle card out of the water. it doesn't look like much time was spent in designing the cooling solution that will effectively cool off the card.Ajax9000 - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
[quote]The only thing Sparkle's 8800 GT is missing is HDMI output, ...[/quote]The SLI connector photo on page 3 shows what is supposedly a SPDIF header next to the SLI connector. A couple of the pre-release leak sites mentioned that the 8800GTs were designed to do HDMI-over-DVI, but post-launch I haven't seen any reviews look into this. I don't know if it is due to many shipping cards not having the SPDIF header, a driver issue, or ... ???
bob4432 - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
hdmi over dvi? both are digital but hdmi has the audio in the same cable. dvi=hdmi in video qualityAjax9000 - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
Yep, absolutely. Rather than having dedicated wires for the audio, HDMI encodes the audio into the video signal. More detail here:http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=10316508...">http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=10316508...
Ajax9000 - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
Oops! Sorry about the multiple posts.Ajax9000 - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
Yep, absolutely. Rather than having dedicated wires for the audio, HDMI encodes the audio into the video signal. More detail here:http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=10316508...">http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=10316508...
Ajax9000 - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
Yep, absolutely. Rather than having dedicated wires for the audio, HDMI encodes the audio into the video signal. More detail here:http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=10316508...">http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=10316508...
misleading99 - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
I'm not impressed with this article.The comparisons between stock GT and the Sparkle should have been made with the stock GT's fan (which runs by default at 29%) run up to a level where it is not, or barely, audible.
While this will differ from case-to-case (I can start to hear mine around 45%), a little extra fan speed afforded to the stock GT would go a LONG way towards lowering temps and therefore showing a much bigger difference between the stock GT and the Sparkle.