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
Getting it Going
Remember my skepticism from earlier? I was so eager to find out if this thing worked that I threw it into our Core 2 Extreme QX9770 testbed which was already setup and ready to accept such a thermally defiant graphics card.
Surprisingly enough, it worked. In working on the 8800 GT roundup I quickly discovered that Crysis was an excellent overclocking/thermal test. It turns out that a number of early overclocked 8800 GT boards were either overclocked too far or didn't have their fans set to come on early enough, resulting in a lot of crashing and general unpleasantness. What's most interesting is that these cards would complete our Oblivion and Bioshock tests without a problem, but just firing up Crysis and trying to change resolutions was enough to lock up the entire system. Thus Crysis would be the perfect game to stress test the passively cooled Sparkle.
The G92 GPU temperature maxed out at around 102C (215.6F), which is amazingly hot. The heatsink itself grew hotter than anything we remember ever touching outside of a kitchen. We had to do a sanity check and look up the burning point of paper just to make sure we weren't creating a fire hazard by running this thing.
This temp comes from our next test...
Surprisingly enough, the system remained stable and we continued to play Crysis and run through our normal gaming benchmarks without a hitch. However, we had no idea if the 8800 GT Passive would hold up under a more real-world scenario: inside a case.
Making it Hot
We did have an ulterior motive for pairing the Sparkle 8800 GT Passive with our QX9770 test bed, we wanted to toss it in a case with the hottest, fastest Intel processor we had.
We gutted a nearby Velocity Micro HTPC and swapped in our ASUS P5E3 Deluxe (X38) motherboard and QX9770. If you're not familiar with the QX9770, it's a quad-core 3.2GHz Penryn/Yorkfield based processor that won't be out until early 2008. It's got a TDP of 135W and manages to get quite warm, so putting it three inches away from the Sparkle's fanless heatsink just seemed like a great idea.
We also threw in a 150GB Western Digital Raptor hard drive, we could've gone with something cooler but where's the fun in that?
The chassis has two 80mm case fans in the back above the CPU and we tested with them both on and off. The Seasonic SS-700HM PSU has two fans of its own, so running the system without any extra case fans wouldn't be a huge deal.
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toyota - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
We don't know how the 256MB variants will perform, but NVIDIA claims that they will arrive at $179 - $199.http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3151...">http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3151...
jonnyGURU - Friday, November 30, 2007 - link
Yeah. Comparing an XFX card at TigerDirect vs. a BFG card sold at it's MSRP on the manufacturer's webstore is very subjective journalism there Anandy. ;)Tegeril - Monday, December 10, 2007 - link
It would seem that you missed the part where those prices were shown to highlight shipping costs.toyota - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
no edit?also the same article says this about 8800gt 512mb: Prices went from the expected $199 - $249 to a completely unexpected $250 - $300 range.
Crusader - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
Looks just like my 8600GTS from MSI with passive cooling.Gonna have to upgrade to this card though!
docmilo - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
I just gutted my tower and stuck my computer into a Q-Pack case and my x1900xt is running over degrees cooler. The power supply in the small case blows a ton of air straight down on the video card and when I run the ATI overdrive my card never gets over 80 degrees when testing for a stable overclock where it would push 100 degrees in my full tower case.This thing would be perfect for a case like mine.
docmilo - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
Over 10 degrees cooler that is. Where's the edit button when you need one?kilkennycat - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
Ah, yes. After at least 2 years, Anandtech and Dailytech still have not been able to attain the edit-sophistication of the article-comment section of "The Tech Report" . Maybe Scott and his crew could give the Anandtech/Dailytech web-designers a hint or two ?gerf - Saturday, December 1, 2007 - link
Editing is lame. Post it for better or for worse. I even frequent forums with no editing, much like this, and prefer it over the crappy phpBB forums.Basilisk - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
Perhaps I misunderstand your post, but... putting this card in my X-Qpack case would require removing a large portion of the power-supply (over the video card slot) where the heat pipes need to pass over the card. Same problem with several other cases I've used.Which is the @#$%^ problem with most passively cooled powerful GPU's: their pipes increase the vertical requirements too much. I wish they'd either notch the top of the cards for the pipes, or pass the pipes through notches on either end of the card. The current "over the top" approach minimizes their effort in re-utilizing non-passive card layouts, but the reverse could be done -- just build all cards on the notched-board design even if they use fans and no pipes.