At first I want to thank Sparkle for providing me their GeForce GTS250 Low Profile Series for testing and reviewing.

About Sparkle:

" 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:

All product planning will have environmental protection aspects taken into consideration.

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. "

Specifications:

About Nvidia PhysX

Delivering physics in games is no easy task. It's an extremely compute-intensive environment based on a unique set of physics algorithms that require tremendous amounts of simultaneous mathematical and logical calculations.

This is where NVIDIA® PhysX™ Technology and GeForce® processors come in. NVIDIA PhysX is a powerful physics engine which enables real-time physics in leading edge PC and console games. PhysX software is widely adopted by over 150 games, is used by more than 10,000 registered users and is supported on Sony Playstation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii and PC.

In addition, PhysX is designed specifically for hardware acceleration by powerful processors with hundreds of cores. Combined with the tremendous parallel processing capability of the GPU, PhysX will provide an exponential increase in physics processing power and will take gaming to a new level delivering rich, immersive physical gaming environments with features such as:

* Explosions that cause dust and collateral debris
* Characters with complex, jointed geometries for more life-like motion and interaction
* Spectacular new weapons with incredible effects
* Cloth that drapes and tears naturally
* Dense smoke & fog that billow around objects in motion

The only way to get real physics with the scale, sophistication, fidelity and level of interactivity that dramatically alters your entertainment experience will be with one of the millions of NVIDIA PhysX-ready GeForce processors.

Here are some PhysX demos from Youtube :

Nvidia CUDA :

NVIDIA® CUDA™ is a general purpose parallel computing architecture that leverages the parallel compute engine in NVIDIA graphics processing units (GPUs) to solve many complex computational problems in a fraction of the time required on a CPU. It includes the CUDA Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and the parallel compute engine in the GPU. To program to the CUDATM architecture, developers can, today, use C, one of the most widely used high-level programming languages, which can then be run at great performance on a CUDATM enabled processor. Other languages will be supported in the future, including FORTRAN and C++.

With over 100 million CUDA-enabled GPUs sold to date, thousands of software developers are already using the free CUDA software development tools to solve problems in a variety of professional and home applications – from video and audio processing and physics simulations, to oil and gas exploration, product design, medical imaging, and scientific research.

Technology features :

* Standard C language for parallel application development on the GPU
* Standard numerical libraries for FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) and BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines)
* Dedicated CUDA driver for computing with fast data transfer path between GPU and CPU
* CUDA driver interoperates with OpenGL and DirectX graphics drivers
* Support for Linux 32/64-bit and Windows XP 32/64-bit operating systems

On one of the sides, we can see the key features, but also the minimum system requirements in which we can install the video card:

On the other side, we can see the SmartInstall application, which helps us install the drivers for the video card; further down, we can see some of the product specifications:

On the back of the box, we can see some supported technologies explained, and the product specifications are translated in multiple languages:

After we open the external box, we can find another plain internal one, designed to protect the product inside even more:

The internal box is divided in 2 compartments: in the upper part we can see the card wrapped in a bubble bag and in the bottom part we can find the accessories:

Besides the video card, in the package we can find a Quick Start Guide, a CD with drivers, a DVI-VGA adapter, a Molex-to-PCI-E 6-pin power connector, a HDMI audio cable:

The video card is further protected with a sealed anti-static bag:

The video card features an aluminium heatsink on the GPU, which touches with its fins the RAM thermal pads and near it we find another heatsink, for the VRM:

The aluminium heatsink has a fan on top of it, which is transparent, has the Sparkle logo on it and blows air directly on the heatsink fins:

Opposed to the fan connector, on the other lateral we can find the header for the HDMI audio cable:

On the other side of the board, we can see the passive VRM heatsink, which is held in place on the PCB with push pins and between the mosfets and the heatsink we fan find a thermal pad:

Here is another photo on the side of the video card, which shows us the distance between the heatsink and the PCB:

On the back of the board, we can see the rest of the mosfets, a sticker with the installed BIOS version and another one that shows us the video card full code name and its specifications:

Under each screw designed to hold the heatsink secure into place, we can find a spacer, to avoid scratching the blue PCB:

If we look closer on the mosfets, we can see that these are made by STMicroelectronics:

This board does come with a HDMI port and a DVI port:

The drivers used for testing were the 196.21 WHQL and the OS on which the tests were performed was Windows 7 Ultimate.

Here is the GPU-Z 0.3.9 report, regarding the GTS250 Low Profile video card from Sparkle:

Here is a more in-depth report, regarding the GTS250 video card, with the Everest Ultimate Edition 5.30 utility:

Finally, here are the CUDA capabilities, also collected with the Everest Ultimate Edition 5.30 utility:

* The Vantage score was calculated by making a sum between the CPU Score and the GPU score, not the total score Vantage displays in the end. In the Performance tests, the CPU score was 22050 and in the Extreme tests, the CPU score was 19950.

* Some scores are missing for the GT240 video cards because the application was displaying only the FPS counter with the 0 value and a blank screen, when setting those specific resolutions were set.

However, even with these clocks reduced, it has succeeded to surpass the GT240 performance by a large margin. Playing most of the games cannot be a problem if we also do have a dual core or quad core in our media center, at 1280x1024 and 1600x1200, with or without antialiasing.

-since this is a low profile video card, it should have been shipped with a low profile bracket also, because it's not very easy to find a separate one in specialized shops

-most of the cards I have tested and seen in the past did also have a D-SUB connector; this would be a nice add for people that do not want to invest in a HDMI cable and want to use the D-SUB cable that came in their TV box, as a bundle

-cooling could be also be improved a little, because I've seen that in the FurMark stress test, the video card reaches the maximum threshold temperature after 10 minutes or so. For those who ask, the threshold temperature is set to 105 degrees Celsius, in the board BIOS.

I would like to thank again to Sparkle for sending me this video card for review!