14 DAY TRIAL // If you have been keeping a close eye on GTX 580-based graphics cards, then you definitely noticed that all the boards that made it into the market until now were based on Nvidia's reference design, the Santa Clara company setting a much more thorough inspection process for custom models.
Therefore, Sparkle is really proud to announce it has become the first company to produce an independently designed GeForce GTX 580.
Dubbed the GeForce GTX 580 V-Go, this graphics card had to go through a rigorous test and verification procedure as Nvidia has decided that, for the GTX 500 series, it won't allow for any custom designs that fail to meet its expectations.
This way, Nvidia can better protect the GeForce brand, as all the in-house designs that make it to market will feature at least the same cooling and acoustic performance as their reference card.
However, moving away from all these slight changes, the V-Go is pretty much your standard GTX 580 since it boasts the same specs as most of its competitors, Sparkle choosing to go with Nvidia's stock clocks for this GPU.
This means the core is run at 772MHz while the memory frequency is set to 1002MHz (4008MHz data rate), the board coming with 512 stream processors, 64 texturing units, 48 ROPs as well as with a 384-bit memory bus and 1.5GB of frame buffer.
“We are pleased with the new high level of Sparkle R&D and production capabilities.” said Kevin Wang, general manager of Sparkle.
“Our mission is to provide the best graphics cards products and services to DIY players and professionals with expertise spirit on graphics cards manufacturing for 16 years," continued Mr. Wang.
Unfortunately, no details about pricing are available, although I expect this to be priced similarly to other GTX 580-based cards as gaming performance isn't substantially improved.