VGA Reviews by stefan @ 2010-11-29
The Calibre X460G graphics card from Sparkle is an interesting product, featuring a high overclock from factory, but also an Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo Pro cooler to ensure low temperatures and noise.
At first I would like to thank Sparkle for offering me an opportunity to test a sample of their Calibre X460G graphics card.
"SPARKLE was established in 1982. SPARKLE is a company with endless energy, vitality and a management of unmatched wit and dedication. SPARKLE respects individualism, insists on highest quality, cares about the natural environment and serves its customers with highest regard. These principles have already penetrated into every corner of the company, motivating SPARKLE and its industry peers toward their leadership positions all the way into the next century.
Motivation of Human Hearts
SPARKLE never ceases to motivate for the sake of creativity and innovation. SPARKLE always seeks to surpass the status quo, and has always been attentive to the basic human elements of individualism and intuition.
Unending Pursuit of Quality
SPARKLE only applies the newest and most advanced graphic card technologies to its products, offers them to the market at reasonable prices and keeps a keen eye on consumer needs in the real world.
SPARKLE has comprehensive lines of products tested with the most stringent quality standards and test requirements. SPARKLE products also provide the most stable operation and excellent performance, and are available to consumers at very market competitive prices.
Attentive Post Sales Service
SPARKLE has always been attentive in providing high value, high quality products and is dedicated to maximize customer satisfaction. Everyone at SPARKLE is prepared and ready in providing the best possible service. Highly trained and professional customer service staff have the ability to solve any problem a customer might encounter and make sure that everyone and their needs will be taken care of.
Environmental and Natural Resources Preservation
SPARKLE has always believed in maintaining a sustainable business and social responsibility; and SPARKLE has two important principles in regards to the natural environment preservation:
1. All product planning will have environmental protection aspects taken into consideration.
2. All relevant products and services are environmentally-friendly within their cycles.
Research and Development
SPARKLE markets its products globally, in more than 80 countries across 5 continents. SPARKLE has a very capable R&D team with highly flexible mobility. SPARKLE offers products and services all over the world and in various fields keeping pace with all developments."
Microsoft® DirectX® 11 Support
DirectX 11 GPU with Shader Model 5.0 support designed for ultra high performance in the new API’s key graphics feature, GPU-accelerated tessellation.
NVIDIA PhysX® Technology
Full support for NVIDIA PhysX technology, enabling a totally new class of physical gaming interaction for a more dynamic and realistic experience with GeForce.
NVIDIA® 3D Vision™ Ready
GeForce GPU support for NVIDIA 3D Vision, bringing a fully immersive stereoscopic 3D experience to the PC. A combination of high-tech wireless glasses and advanced software, 3D Vision transforms hundreds of PC games into full stereoscopic 3D. In addition, you can watch 3D movies and 3D digital photographs in eye popping, crystal-clear quality.
NVIDIA® 3D Vision™ Surround Ready
Expand your games across three displays in full stereoscopic 3D for the ultimate “inside the game” experience with the power of NVIDIA 3D Vision and SLI technologies. NVIDIA® Surround™ also supports triple screen gaming with non-stereo displays.
NVIDIA CUDA™ Technology
CUDA technology unlocks the power of the GPU’s processor cores to accelerate the most demanding tasks such as video transcoding, physics simulation, ray tracing, and more, delivering incredible performance improvements over traditional CPUs.
NVIDIA SLI® Technology
Industry leading NVIDIA SLI technology offers amazing performance scaling for the world’s premier gaming solution.
32x Anti-aliasing Technology
Lightning fast, high-quality anti-aliasing at up to 32x sample rates obliterates jagged edges.
NVIDIA® PureVideo® HD Technology
The combination of high-definition video decode acceleration and post-processing that delivers unprecedented picture clarity, smooth video, accurate color, and precise image scaling for movies and video.
PCI Express 2.0 Support
Designed for the new PCI Express 2.0 bus architecture offering the highest data transfer speeds for the most bandwidth-hungry games and 3D applications, while maintaining backwards compatibility with existing PCI Express motherboards for the broadest support.
Dual-link DVI Support
Able to drive industry’s largest and highest resolution flat-panel displays up to 2560x1600 and with support for High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP).
HDMI 1.4a Support
Fully integrated support for HDMI 1.4a including GPU accelerated Blu-ray 3D4 support, xvYCC, deep color, and 7.1 digital surround sound including Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD. Upgrade your GPU to full 3D capability with NVIDIA 3DTV Play software, enabling 3D gaming, picture viewing and 3D web video streaming. See www.nvidia.com/3dtv for more details.
Overclock Features Brings Unbeatable DX11 Performance To Mainstream Market
Compared with ordinary GeForce GTX 460 graphics cards on market, the Calibre X460G Graphics Card is overclocked out of box. With 790MHz core speed, 3900MHz memory speed and 1580MHz shader clock, it has 17% performance upgrade and take mainstream gamers' DirectX 11 gaming beyond HD.
Excellent Cooling With Arctic Cooling Solution
The Calibre X460G Graphics Card is equipped with the Accelero Cooling Solution from Arctic Cooling, which delivers ultimate cooling weapon for mainstream hardcore gamers. The Accelero Cooling Solution for the Calibre X460G Graphics Card features 4 pure copper heatpipes with 6mm diameter,2 big size PWM fans with 92mm diameter and pure aluminum fins . The radical optimized air flow design is targeting to cool effectively. The Accelero Cooling Solution can adjust the rotating speed of the fans according to the GPU working temperature, dramatically improve the cooling performance up to 12% between the Calibre X460 cooling system and the stock cooler, delivering more performance and has a higher tolerance for overclocking.The two PWM fans from Accelero cooling solution bring maximum air flow but operate extremely silence.
Calibre 3-years International Warranty
SPARKLE Computer Co., Ltd, is continuously improving product and service quality. High quality components are used for the Calibre X460G Graphics Card to ensure 3 years of reliable performance.
Calibre X456G Graphics Cards Comes with 3 free Applications Bundled
MAGIX Video Easy, which is the first video editing program for the whole family. It's so easy to use that even beginners without any prior skills will be able to design breathtaking videos in just a short time. Transform recordings of family celebrations, vacations, or special events into video DVDs or present your videos on the Internet with ease.
Calibre X460G also offer Supersonic Sled and Design Garage,2 new, exciting NVIDIA applications which showcase how GeForce and these new products are driving the future of gaming. Supersonic Sled is a timed race game involving a rocket-driven sled on a 6-mile track. It provides a compelling and interactive showcase of DX11 Tessellation, PhysX, CUDA particles, and fluid simulation. Design Garage is new, exciting demonstration of ray tracing technology. Interact with the most exclusive vehicles on the road and create incredibly photo-realistic images. Harness every last bit of GF104 compute power using CUDA accelerated ray tracing.
With these two applications, SPARKLE wants to literally give consumers the keys to the new GF104 architecture. To expose and showcase the new level of interactivity and realism that this architecture enables. Applications so compelling that consumers will spend hours playing with.
The mid-range GTX 460 is another Fermi GPU from Nvidia; the GPU is redesigned compared to the older 480, 470 or 465 GTX cards, so now we are dealing with a smaller chip, which is implicitly less complicated to manufacture, would get better yields and it also dissipates less heat.
After the cards were launched, we could see two versions entering the market, a cheaper one with 768MB and another with 1024MB. The Calibre X460G is an overclocked 1Gb unit:
Compared with the GF100, the GF104 has only 2 Graphics processing clusters (instead of 4); this traduces in a number of shader multiprocessors cut to a total of eight. Also, the GF104 has only half number of raster and poly-morph engines compared to the GF100.
The memory controllers have also been reduced, from six to two.
However, if we look with more attention on the representation of a SM unit, we can count a total of 48 CUDA cores, opposed to 32 that were in the GF100.
The number of texture units in the SM have been doubled to eight and this gives the GF104 faster texturing capabilities.
The Calibre video card from Sparkle has arrived with its cardboard box completely wrapped in a transparent plastic bag, for extra protection:
The box has an interesting design, which makes the product a perfect gift for many gamers; on the frontal side of the product we can see in center a silver Calibre logo, along with other stickers that inform us the product is fully compatible with Windows 7, the inclusion of the HDMI adapter along with a Starcraft 2 trial voucher and a OC pictogram that tells us the card has been overclocked from factory:
If we look with more attention, we can see that the box does also have a special texture:
The box is also provided with a handle and linked to it we can find a medallion-like item made from cardboard:
On the back of the medallion, we can see the main product technical specifications:
Some extra information can be also found on one of the box laterals:
On the bottom of the box, besides the icons that show us the supported technologies and standards, we can also see listed some of the unique features and after-service information:
The product along with its bundle is further protected inside a black cardboard box:
This box has two compartments: in one of them we can find the card which is wrapped in a plastic bubble bag, and the rest holds the extra cables, adapters:
The bundle consists of two PCI-Express power to MOLEX adapters, a miniHDMI to HDMI adapter, the Starcraft II Trial voucher, a warranty card, a Quick Start Guide, a DVI to VGA adapter and the disk with drivers and applications:
Inside the Quick Start Guide, we can see instructions from how to install the card into the system to driver installation:
For even more protection, the card is wrapped inside a transparent plastic bag:
The Calibre X460G features an Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo Pro cooler, which looks very nice and Sparkle personalized it with new stickers, along with the elegant purple color for both fans blades:
Here is a closer look on one of the fans; the Calibre logo is located in the center and the fan is meant to suck air from inside the case to be able to cool the large aluminium heatsink:
Under the main heatsink, we can see the copper plate which makes direct contact with the GPU HSF, along with the heatpipe terminations:
On both laterals of the heatsink, we can see the full name of the cooler embossed:
To the back of the PCB, we can observe another little aluminium heatsink with fins, that is meant to keep the VRM cool:
Near it, we can find the 4-wire fan connector, that powers up both top fans:
In the back, we can find the 2 6-pin PCI-Express power headers:
When looking from the other side of the card, we can see the 4 large copper heatpipes:
On the back of the PCB, we can see the stickers that have listed the card specs or serial numbers:
One of the stickers show us the name of the flashed firmware file, and the full product code name, that aids the manufacturer to better identify the product when it is sent back to them via RMA:
The VRM is controlled by the ON Semiconductor NCP5388 2/3/4 Phase Channel Controller:
The main heatsink is held fixed with 4 screws, provided with springs, but also washers to avoid scratching the PCB surface:
On the PCB, we can find only one SLI connector:
The card is also provided with 2 DVI connectors and one miniHDMI:
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Stefan's Test Setup
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| CPU | Core i7 920 @ 3.2Ghz |
| Cooling | Cogage True Spirit |
| Mainboard | Asrock X58 Extreme |
| Memory | G.Skill F3-12800CL8T-6GBPI PI Series |
| VGA |
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| Other |
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With the help of the GPU-Z 0.4.8 utility, we could extract lots of information regarding the video card clocks,memory type, pixel and texture fill rate and so on:
To extract even more information, we have used the AIDA64 utility:
Here are the CUDA capabilities of the Calibre X460:
To find out the IDLE and maximum temperatures, I have used the Furmark utility, with the Stability Test in “Xtreme Burning mode” and let it run for about 15 minutes. To record the temperatures, the GPU-Z utility was used, thanks to its Sensors monitoring tab. The recorded room temperature at the time of testing was 20.6 degrees Celsius:
Before measuring the noise the video card was producing, I have first measured the noise inside the room the tests took place and I found out it was 29.1dBA (with everything turned off).
The next step was to measure the noise the test system was producing, without the video card installed; the value I have obtained was 34.1dBA. Most of the fans inside the case were turned off, but the CPU (43%) and chipset one (30%).
At all times, the sound meter was placed 8cm under the video card.
The GPU fan was controlled by the latest version of the EVGA Precision software:
As it can be seen from the chart, the noise grows linear with the increase of the fan speed. Increasing the fan over 80% or setting a speed less than 40% was not possible using EVGA Precision:
The 3DMark Vantage scores were calculated by summing up the GPU and CPU subscores.
Here are the Vantage subscores separately:
We first converted the obtained scores/FPS for each benchmark to a percentage in comparison to the highest score (=100%), we then averaged all the benchmark scores per resolution/IQ and the results are put into these charts. So these are relative performance charts in % to the fastest card. (full performance numbers here)
We first converted the obtained scores/FPS for each benchmark to a percentage in comparison to the highest score (=100%), we then averaged all the benchmark scores per resolution/IQ and the results are put into these charts. So these are relative performance charts in % to the fastest card. (full performance numbers here)
The Calibre X460G is an interesting card to consider, with a pretty good overclock right from the factory. Thanks to this, in most of the benchmarks it went right under the stock clocked GTX 470 and, occasionally it even exceeded its performances. Right from the outside aspect of the box to the insides, we can see that Sparkle has put in extra effort in their "special edition" Calibre series.
Thanks to the custom cooler from Arctic Cooling, the card succeeds to maintain very low operating temperatures in IDLE (26 degrees Celsius) and no more than 52°C in Full Load at a room temperature of 20.6 degrees Celsius, at decent noise levels, even if the GPU frequency has been raised from 675MHz to 790MHz. These results could invite us to overclock the GPU even more.
The only problem I can think of is the fact the cooling system occupies 3-slots and when going SLI, very little space will remain between the cards.
The card can be found in shops for about 175,14 Euros, an interesting offer considering that GTX 470 video cards (stock clocked) can be still found for about 200+ Euros.
I would like to thank again to Sparkle for giving me the opportunity to test out this video card.
