14 DAY TRIAL // While the accelerated graphics port, AGP for short, is no longer used on any wide scale by gamers and computer enthusiasts and the PCI Express 16X rules the performance graphics market, a Taiwanese computer hardware manufacturer and vendor that specializes in video cards decided to launch a series of products that comply with the ancient PCI standard.
SPARKLE announced the launch of two graphics cards, the GeForce 8500 GT PCI and GeForce 7300 GT PCI, that just as their name implies are PCI compliant. The GeForce 8500 GT PCI is based on Nvidia's G86 graphics processor architecture and just like the GeForce 7300 GT PCI card, it is designed to "bring affordable upgrade solutions to special PCI platform and industrial applications with lower prices", according to the company's press release concerning the release of the two cards. The GeForce 8500 GT PCI integrates a number of Nvidia technologies like the Lumenex Engine, GigaThread and the Quantum Effects technology. The Lumenex Engine provides support for Microsoft's DirectX 10 graphics API and Shader Model 4.0, while the Quantum Effects technology is used for physics computation. The GigaThread use allows the graphics chip to reach a new level of efficiency when processing shader related programs. The GeForce 8500 GT PCI uses a core clock speed of 450MHz, with 16 stream processors running at 900MHz, while the big amount of video memory, 256 or 512MB of DDR2, is linked to the GPU by an 128 bits wide data bus.
The SPARKLE GeForce 7300 GT PCI graphics solution is aimed at industrial applications or at users running a computing system based on the PCI standard. The graphics core reaches a clock speed of 350MHz while the DDR2 video memory is available in quantity (256 or 512MB) and it uses a 128 bits wide data bus for transfers between memory and GPU. Not supporting the latest DirectX specifications, the 7300 chip based video card goes for the DirectX 9 standard as it is fully compliant with the Shader Model 3.0. In order to achieve maximum compatibility with all DirectX 9 applications, the graphics chip includes support for vertex texture fetch (VTF for short).
"By introducing SPARKLE GeForce 8500 GT PCI and GeForce 7300 GT PCI Graphic Cards, now special PCI platform and industrial applications platform users can get right products to upgrade.", said Kevin Wang, sales director of SPARKLE Computer. "SPARKLE is proud of providing such an affordable upgrade solutions. Special PCI platform and industrial applications platform users can go on using their favorite machines with less expend on upgrading."