Sparkle Announces New Calibre X560 Series Graphics Cards

Sparkle's has just announced that its Calibre series of custom-built graphics cards has received the addition of two new GTX 560 solutions that are designed to provide users with cooler and quieter operation when compared to Nvidia's reference designs.

In order to achieve this feat, the two graphics cards in the Calibre X560 series, the X560 Ti DF and X560 DF, were equipped with an in-house developed cooling solution.

This relies on two 8mm thick copper heatpipes to draw the heat away from the GPU and into an aluminum fin array that is covered by two 9cm ball bearing fans.

According to the Taiwanese company, this approach should deliver 7% lower temperatures than the cooling design used for the GeForce GTX 560 reference board.

In addition to the improved cooling, the two Calibre X560 graphics cards also feature higher than stock operating frequencies, but Sparkle hasn't revealed their exact clocks and settled with saying that the X560 Ti DF surpasses the stock GTX 560 Ti by 14% in 3DMark 11.

Both the GeForce GTX 560 Ti and the GTX 560 are based on the Nvidia GF114 GPU, but their specs differ as the non-Ti version has some of its shaders disabled in order to decrease production costs.

As a result, the GTX 560 Ti sports 384 stream processors, 64 texture units, 32 ROP units and a 256-bit wide memory bus, while the GTX 560 retains most of these specs but packs only 336 stream processors and 56 texture units.

Furthermore, the GTX 560 also has a slightly slower GPU clock than that of its older brother, 822MHz vs. 810MHz, but the 1GB of GDDR5 memory operates at the same 1001MHz (4004MHz data rate).

Sparkle hasn't released any information regarding the price or the release date of the two Calibre X560 series solutions.