Sparkle Calibre X265 GeForce GTX 260 896MB video card review
 

While much of the positive talk this generation may have surrounded AMD's Radeon HD 4800 series of graphics boards, NVIDIA's competing GeForce GTX 200 parts still have a lot to offer in their own right, particularly when matched up with some smart thinking on the part of AIB partners. Today, we take a look (for the first time on this site) at a graphics board from Sparkle, who have looked to add their own particular spin to the GeForce GTX 260 in terms of both clock speeds and cooling solution. Have they succeeded in creating a compelling offering? We check it out.


We spoke earlier about the slightly different way that the Calibre X265 handles its factory overclocks compared to a lot of similar graphics boards, and the image above is the reason why, for Sparkle's offering here ships with a very small, lightweight application named SPATune.

This little bit of software (which sets itself to run at start-up by default) allows you to choose between three clock speed profiles for your card - Standard Mode, which utilises NVIDIA's reference clocks, Overclock Mode, which uses the factory overclocked speeds we mentioned earlier, and Green Mode, which attempts to save power by reducing clock speeds below NVIDIA's reference clocks (to a core clock of 400MHz, shader clock of 800MHz and memory clock of 300MHz on this occasion). The application can also monitor GPU temperatures and fan speeds as well as reporting on clock speeds, and switching between performance profiles is as simple as clicking the option you require and confirming the selection.

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