Sparkle

Here we go. Remember these guys from 2005? They were the eVGA OEM folks back then. A while back, 100% of eVGA's cards were made by Sparkle. Now their contract is done and eVGA is cutting down on using Sparkle cards while Sparkle is making a name for themselves. They said two years ago that they wanted to get into the North American market. Guess what? They made it. As of April of this year, they started selling their cards at Tigerdirect. In the next few months, they will be selling their cards at Newegg. In any case, what did we see at the booth? Firstly, they have a few high-end cards (their Calibre series) with a very interesting cooler design. It comes with an integrated peltier, but it's not an always on. It turns on only when the temperature threshold is exceeded and turns off when unneeded. According to the representative, these coolers run a few degrees Celsius lower than competing cooling contraptions. They also had a card with a temperature display on the side, much like the Corsair XMS Xpert modules.

XFX

We also had a brief visit at XFX where they had the GeForce 8600GT with 256MB of DDR3 memory and an engine clock at 620MHz with the memory running at 1.7GHz. Also on display was their GeForce 8800 Ultra. More on them later this week.