Silence is golden

Product Sparkle GeForce 9600GT 512 MB
Web site sparkle.com.tw

THE FIRST GeForce 9-series product, the 9600GT, has finally arrived. Even though, frankly, there isn't much - if any - news compared to the most recent 8800-series 65nm parts, the usual "new product" hype still lives.

Here we have a quickie look at one of the more unique 9600GT offerings from Sparkle.

This is a completely silent thing there are no fans, baby!

The fan is replaced by three heat pipes bringing the heat to the radiator fins on the back of the card. That may be a problem if there is another card - or, for instance, Skulltrail mobo memory fan for those hot FB-DIMMs - there. Same for certain more custom North Bridge chipset cooling solutions: please check for any spatial conflict.

Otherwise, the card runs without any slowdown compared to its fanned brethren. Another benefit is that the front portion is unusually thin - something like half-slot width occupied. This ensures there's plenty of air circulation for the next card in a slot, like another - fan-equipped - 9600 GT in SLI, or, say, Creative X-Fi sound in a PCI slot.

We ran the Sparkle 9600GT on the Intel Skulltrail test bed with the usual twin 4GHz quad-core Intel QX9775 processors and 8GB FBD RAM in full 4-channel config. The benefit of using this behemoth even with this midrange card is that there are absolutely no CPU-related bottlenecks, even with good old 3DMark.

The new ForceWare 174.16 driver was used under Windoze Vista 64-bit.

Here are the first 3DMark06 results:

default SXGA

1920x1200 WUXGA

2560x1600 4 Mpixel

Now, the same for Sparkle GeForce 8800GT on the same board:

Default SXGA

1920x1200 WUXGA

2560x1600 4 Mpixel

As you can see, the 9600GT is still well behind the higher-end 'elder cousin'. So, there is no direct threat to each other, as long as the prices are kept well apart - anything less than 50 dollars difference would, well, make the older card just too comfortable.

On another subject, the 9600GT 3DMark performance matches ATI's HD3870 card, and it is a bit too close to the overclocked high-end HD3870 offerings. Not exactly great situation for DAAMIT, but then - the RV670 die is due for the A12 stepping speed boost this coming month anyway.

In summary, Sparkle has delivered a completely silent midrange 3-D offering with their GeForce 9600GT flavour, without compromising the performance. There's no point applying expensive vapour chamber or water cooling solutions on the 9600, since only higher-end cards justify such cost add-on. Let's see what will they offer on the 9800GTX in a month or two. ?

Good Silence without losing speed
Bad The radiators may have space conflicts on some mobos
Ugly Carbon footprint

Barman's Verdict