Sparkle 8800 GT Passive: The Fastest Silent GPU in the World
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 29, 2007 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Getting it Going
Remember my skepticism from earlier? I was so eager to find out if this thing worked that I threw it into our Core 2 Extreme QX9770 testbed which was already setup and ready to accept such a thermally defiant graphics card.
Surprisingly enough, it worked. In working on the 8800 GT roundup I quickly discovered that Crysis was an excellent overclocking/thermal test. It turns out that a number of early overclocked 8800 GT boards were either overclocked too far or didn't have their fans set to come on early enough, resulting in a lot of crashing and general unpleasantness. What's most interesting is that these cards would complete our Oblivion and Bioshock tests without a problem, but just firing up Crysis and trying to change resolutions was enough to lock up the entire system. Thus Crysis would be the perfect game to stress test the passively cooled Sparkle.
The G92 GPU temperature maxed out at around 102C (215.6F), which is amazingly hot. The heatsink itself grew hotter than anything we remember ever touching outside of a kitchen. We had to do a sanity check and look up the burning point of paper just to make sure we weren't creating a fire hazard by running this thing.
This temp comes from our next test...
Surprisingly enough, the system remained stable and we continued to play Crysis and run through our normal gaming benchmarks without a hitch. However, we had no idea if the 8800 GT Passive would hold up under a more real-world scenario: inside a case.
Making it Hot
We did have an ulterior motive for pairing the Sparkle 8800 GT Passive with our QX9770 test bed, we wanted to toss it in a case with the hottest, fastest Intel processor we had.
We gutted a nearby Velocity Micro HTPC and swapped in our ASUS P5E3 Deluxe (X38) motherboard and QX9770. If you're not familiar with the QX9770, it's a quad-core 3.2GHz Penryn/Yorkfield based processor that won't be out until early 2008. It's got a TDP of 135W and manages to get quite warm, so putting it three inches away from the Sparkle's fanless heatsink just seemed like a great idea.
We also threw in a 150GB Western Digital Raptor hard drive, we could've gone with something cooler but where's the fun in that?
The chassis has two 80mm case fans in the back above the CPU and we tested with them both on and off. The Seasonic SS-700HM PSU has two fans of its own, so running the system without any extra case fans wouldn't be a huge deal.
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FrankM - Friday, November 30, 2007 - link
The testers should be imprisoned for hardware cruelty; and the poor, deeply hurt card should be taken to a loving family where it will be taken better care of - *hint* I have waterblocks! And cookies! :DFlame on :D
Ender17 - Friday, November 30, 2007 - link
What's the big deal? This is just a cheap rip off of the Thermalright HR-03 heatsink. I've been running my 8800GTS passive for the past 6 months.j00k - Friday, November 30, 2007 - link
i'm sure all someone has to do now is make a much better passive heatsink and that'll blow this POS sparkle card out of the water. it doesn't look like much time was spent in designing the cooling solution that will effectively cool off the card.Ajax9000 - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
[quote]The only thing Sparkle's 8800 GT is missing is HDMI output, ...[/quote]The SLI connector photo on page 3 shows what is supposedly a SPDIF header next to the SLI connector. A couple of the pre-release leak sites mentioned that the 8800GTs were designed to do HDMI-over-DVI, but post-launch I haven't seen any reviews look into this. I don't know if it is due to many shipping cards not having the SPDIF header, a driver issue, or ... ???
bob4432 - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
hdmi over dvi? both are digital but hdmi has the audio in the same cable. dvi=hdmi in video qualityAjax9000 - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
Yep, absolutely. Rather than having dedicated wires for the audio, HDMI encodes the audio into the video signal. More detail here:http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=10316508...">http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=10316508...
Ajax9000 - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
Oops! Sorry about the multiple posts.Ajax9000 - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
Yep, absolutely. Rather than having dedicated wires for the audio, HDMI encodes the audio into the video signal. More detail here:http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=10316508...">http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=10316508...
Ajax9000 - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
Yep, absolutely. Rather than having dedicated wires for the audio, HDMI encodes the audio into the video signal. More detail here:http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=10316508...">http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=10316508...
misleading99 - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
I'm not impressed with this article.The comparisons between stock GT and the Sparkle should have been made with the stock GT's fan (which runs by default at 29%) run up to a level where it is not, or barely, audible.
While this will differ from case-to-case (I can start to hear mine around 45%), a little extra fan speed afforded to the stock GT would go a LONG way towards lowering temps and therefore showing a much bigger difference between the stock GT and the Sparkle.