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Sparkle Calibre P790+ 512 MB (SLI)Model: GeForce 7900 GT 512MB
Manufacturer: Sparkle
Distributor: dollarshop
Info: calibrestyle.com.tw
Price: 329 EUR
Greetings earthling .. and welcome to yet another NVIDIA review. This time we'll be looking at two lovely pre-overclocked cards from the guys that'll make your eyes Sparkle ... Sparkle. Sparkle is a company that has been around in the graphics arena for longer then I have been and I started in ... (yes I'm OLD! :) None the less, the company always remained a little transparent in the European and US market. They are not really out there with reviews or marketing and thus a lot of consumers simply do not see or know them. And that's a loss when you have a consumer in the store comparing cards from brand A with brand B. If it's an ASUS and it'll cost 10 bucks more then people will buy the Asus by brand recognition alone. That's how it works.
Luckily here in the Netherlands we now have a marketing employee from Sparkle responsible for giving the brand some more reputation, and obviously Guru3D.com can help them with that.
I'll be honest here, I can't remember the last time I ever had a Sparkle product in my hands; mainly due to the same reasons as described above. But when the first products started to arrive (at least the Calibre series) I immediately started to wonder why Sparkle is still not that popular of a brand ... because the products tested today are among the finest I have ever seen.
The cards to be tested are two GeForce 7900 GT's. Now I can hear you say another 7900 GT review Hilbert, really ? Yeah .. but you are on Guru3D.com, so these are not your average 7900 GT's my friends. In fact we might have the two most delicious 7900 GT cards tested available to date !
Sparkle has their usual line of cards and then their Calibre line of cards as well. Much like other companies, the Calibre series is slightly more expensive yet you'll receive some pretty nifty extra candy. In the case of the GeForce 7900 GT they are offering a 790 and 790+ model of this videocard and we'll be looking at that 790+ model.
What do you need to know? Well, the reference model GeForce 7900 GT runs at 450 MHz and it's memory at 660 MHz. This model is clocked at 560 MHZ and it's memory at 700 MHz. Not only that .. this model does not have 256MB memory but 512MB of gDDR3 memory. What does that remind you of ? Correct .. glue two together and you have a GeForce 7950 GX2. So if you put two Calibre 790+ cards in SLI mode you'll actually have a solution faster than the GeForce 7950 GX2; which really does not suck!
Still with me ? No ? Okay, go to the next page where I'll go a little deeper into this ...
