Sparkle Produces the First 80nm Nvidia Card

I'm proud to announce that there are actually manufacturers who dare to launch products without feeling the need to wait for CES. And this is no ordinary memory stick or fancy cooler. Sparkle has announced its latest Calibre P768 card based on Geforce 7600 GT. Nothing out of the ordinary except that the card uses the first 80nm GPU that comes from Nvidia.

The new 80 nanometer cores are available for quite some time, but Sparkle ends up being the first Nvidia integrator to use them. Sparkle's card comes with its GPU clocked at 650MHz - 90MHz faster than the reference 7600 GT clock. The chip behind it is G73 actually, it uses the string: G73-GT-N-B1 and is indeed the first 80 nanometer chip ever to come from Nvidia. But it will probably also be the last G7x chip that receives 80nm support since Nvidia plans offer a future G84 built under the same 80nm process.
The memory on this card works at 1600MHz (1400MHz is the reference clock on the 7600GT chips but the final clocks on the cards largely depend on the memories that are being used). Nvidia kept the reference design alive so you'll find enough 128-bit chips on the PCB to produce a total of 256 GDDR3. As always, the interface is PCIE x16.

The card is significantly faster than standard 7600GT and can even surpass "extreme" models clocked at around 575-590 GPU/1600 GDDR3 but this is not the main idea behind such a product. What raises our interest here is its overclocking potential, which is supposed to be very high. Moreover, I think that the die shrinkage will also result in a reduction of the power consumption (I'd say that the 7600GT consumes around 5-10% less than the older 7600GT if using the same clocks).