Mar 30, 2011 14:02 GMT  ·  By

With all the new high-end video controllers coming out, especially the GeForce GTX 590 dual-GPU adapter, one wouldn't expect a new 400 model to be released, but this is exactly what Sparkle has done.

Sparkle can be said to be among the more unusual of graphics cards providers, for the simple reason that it deals in more than one card with components that are unlike what one might expect.

The company seems to like striking lower price points by putting different sorts of memory chips to good use when constructing certain video controllers.

It is this habit, so to speak, that prompted Sparkle to come forth and show off a pair of GeForce GTS 450 boards, even though the 500 series, successor to the 400, is in full swing.

The adapters themselves, in turn, stand apart from their own kind, as they have DDR3 memory instead of the GDDR5 that powerful models of this sort usually employ.

The only thing that distinguishes between the members of the new duo is the memory capacity they each are equipped with.

Specifically, one has 1 GB of DDR3, while the other one goes fully upwards, to 2 GB. For the sake of comparison, original GTS 450 boards use 1 GB of GDDR5.

As far as everything else goes, their feature sets are quite similar, if not outright identical, from the GPU to the cooler and connectivity (D-Sub, DVI and HDMI).

The graphics processing units work at 783 MHz, while the shaders (192 CUDA cores) are set at 1,566 MHz.

Finally, the Sun Flower cooler uses the wind tunnel design and cooling fins with negative direction toward the wing tunnel, for faster, radial heat conduction.

Sparkle did not mention just how much either of these products sells for, but this mystery should be solved when listings actually show up online.