Sparkle tunes a souped-up Geforce 9500 GT

USUALLY THE TOP of the high-end crop is selected for advanced overclocking, tuning and such - this applies to graphics cards as well.

Sparkle, the cute, plucky Nvidia partner, went for a different approach: how about bolstering a midrange Geforce 9500 under its Calibre OC brand, then add better cooling and some "enthusiast" gadgetry, and see how far it will fly?

Packed in an unusual-looking, travel bag package, the card has the usual 512MB GDDR3 memory at 1.8Hzへるつ - the GPU runs at 600MHz. The Thermaltake Orb-type heatsink and fan grace the card, together with two DVI outputs - why not DVI plus HDMI here? After all, this card is more likely to go into a mid-range system connected to a HDTV set than a high-end PC.

There's also a Calibre-unique feature, an external drive-bay sized black box with display and buttons showing the clock, temperature, voltage and fan speed. Again, something one would rather see with, say, GTX280 OC card.

We ran the card on one of top Nforce-based mobos around, the Asus Striker II Extreme, equipped with four sticks of Kingston's ultrafast DDR3-2000 SLI-ready EPP2 memory for a total of 4GB RAM. These DIMMs could do, with some nasty voltage push, CL8 at DDR3-2000 speed - very useful provided your CPU can reach stable FSB2000.

Our QX9650 can't, but a dual core E-step Core 2 8600 surely can. In this case, it ran DDR3-2000 at CR2 command rate even though the FSB was at default 1333 MHz - a funny EPP2 setting where memory bandwidth is exactly triple the FSB throughput.

Anyway, the CPU, QX9650 was downclocked to 2.66GHz / FSB1333, a typical QX9450 midrange level which is a more optimum match for this card.

Here are the 3DMark Vantage results in Vista Windoze flavour:

As you can see, yes there is some benefit of a bit of LCD gadget plus OC capability which frankly didn't really matter, but in reality it is like a missed target - like putting Joe the Plumber in the Oval Office for instance.

In summary, Sparkle has interesting OC products in the Calibre line, we just hope they stay focused on the higher end like (9800GTX+ and above) in that segment. It is putting a strong price pressure there as well, so the US$ 150 onwards should be the target market for Calibre modding. ?

The Good - Dares to do an overclocked a midrange card
The Bad - Shouldn't overclock a midrange card
the Ugly - Should have done this on the HD4870 ATI instead

Barman's Verdict