The card comes with out-of-the-box overclocking

Mar 27, 2008 11:24 GMT  ·  By

Graphics manufacturer Sparkle has just introduced its Calibre P960 Graphics Card, an overclocked version of GeForce 9600 GT with company's proprietary adjustable Dual Fly Cooling System. The graphics card comes overclocked out of box, but its interesting cooling solution can be adjusted to dissipate large amounts of residual heat.

Calibre P960's graphics processor is clocked at a core speed of 700 MHz, with 1850 MHz shader clock and 256-bit 512MB 2000MHz GDDR3 high-speed video memory. According to the company, the P960 scores 12635 in the 3DMark06 default test, 9.6 percent higher than the stock GeForce 9600 GT cards.

Sparkle's new graphics card offering connects to the computer via a PCI-Express 2.0 expansion slot and provides a data bandwidth of 5GT/s, but it preserve the backwards compatibility with the PCI-Express 1.1 standard. However, when used on a PCI-Express 1.1 motherboard, the maximum data transfer rate is limited to 2.5 GT/s.

According to its technical sheet, the card comes with the second-generation PureVideo HD technology from Nvidia, for improved Blu-Ray / HD-DVD picture quality, while the H.264 video decoding engine offloads the decoding tasks from the system CPU.

"The Calibre P960 Graphics Card is the first product to be introduced in the Calibre GeForce 9 family, giving gamers the horsepower to play cutting-edge DirectX 10 games at a price they will love and can afford," Said Angus Huang, product manager of SPARKLE Computer.

Sparkle manufactured the Calibre P960 series using state-of-the-art hardware components, including high-quality MOS circuits and Japanese solid capacitors to prevent leaking and distortions.

The graphic card's cooling system is extremely interesting and replaces the less-efficient cooling fans, allowing the manufacturer to take the GPU to higher clock frequencies. The dual-fan behemoth is ventilated by the company's Dual Fly Cooling System, comprised of aluminum die-casting thermal base with copper cores, three high-efficiency heat pipes and dual cooling fans surrounded by 0.2-millimeter thin cooling fins.

There is no word on availability or pricing as for the moment of writing.

Photo Gallery (2 Images)

The Dual-DVI behemoth comes with a proprietary cooling system
Cooling system overview
Open gallery