14 DAY TRIAL // As end-users no doubt know by now, NVIDIA recently released its GeForce GTX 580 card, and Sparkle is now following suite with its own offering, made up of two boards.
For those consumers interested in a reminder, the newcomer is the most powerful card so far released by NVIDIA.
Many of the Santa Clara, California-based company's partners have already contributed with their own models.
Now, Sparkle came forth and introduced not one but two cards, one of which stays faithful to the reference design while the other one goes beyond the norm somewhat.
The so-called 'regular' version retains the same cooler as the original and has identical specifications.
This gives it 512 CUDA cores, 1,536 MB of GDDR5 VRAM, a memory interface of 384 bits and clocks of 772 MHz for the GF110 GPU, 1,544 MHz for the shaders and 4,008 MHz for the memory.
Then there is the Calibre X580, a factory-overclocked card whose graphics processor operates at 810 MHz and whose shader and VRAM frequencies are of 1,620 MHz and 4,032 MHz, respectively.
The other noteworthy asset of this tweaked GTX 580 is how it makes use of a different cooling module.
Basically, the newcomer is equipped with an Arctic Accelero Xtreme cooler, which uses a large heatsink, copper heatpipes and three fans to disperse whatever extra heat is produced by the boosted clock speeds.
Needless to say, both cards are compatible with the PCI Express 2.0 interface and have dual-DVI and a mini HDMI port, for video output.
Finally, the Calibre X580 is said to have a lower heat generation and, of course, a lower operating temperature, in addition to a three-year warranty.
Unfortunately, the newcomers have not yet started selling, though they should cost around $550, or more for the custom-cooled one, when they do show up in stores.
