Computex Taipei 2005 Coverage
The third day of Computex has finally rolled to an end and it’s again time for our daily report…very extremely long daily report that is. Today we spent more time wandering Hall 2 of the TWTC.
Now when we say Sparkle, a lot of you out there will probably think Sparkle power supply. However, Sparkle Computer has nothing to do with the Fortron Source Power who makes Sparkle power supplies. They are in fact a graphics card company. Since probably no one knows anything about them, we’ll briefly introduce the company. Sparkle Computer Co., LTD is definitely not a newcomer to the graphics card industry. It was established in December 1982 and has been producing and specializing in graphics cards for a long time. In fact, although you might not know the name, many of you PNY or eVGA users could in fact be using Sparkle cards, as apparently they served as an OEM to these companies for quite some time. They believe in designing all their own PCB’s and cooling solutions rather than following the NVIDIA reference designs. As you can see in the pictures they have come up with some pretty interesting looking cooling solutions.
Something else that is very interesting is their GeForce 6800 (SP-PX42DH Extreme Edition). The cooler that sits on that card looks suspiciously like a Zalman doesn’t it? But wait, looks a little different doesn’t it? Well, it in fact IS a Zalman cooler! This cooler was designed and built exclusively for Sparkle by Zalman. In fact the performance of this cooler is supposed to be even better than that of the retail Zalman cooler.
They also have a low-end line for normal everyday users. Also if you notice their SP-PC44DH card, it is actually a PCI card! Yes! A good old PCI card. It is aimed toward those who still have PCI slots and would like to upgrade to some better graphics. No other company we know of has built a PCI GeForce 6200.
According to their press kit, their cards are supposed to perform better and be more stable than their competitors, running the same setup. In fact in their press kit, they claimed that their Calibre A650 GeForce 6600GT scored 8450 while their competitors only scored 6155. This is quite a huge performance gap, and if it is correct, then that is one amazing 6600GT. Does it seem possible? Perhaps. However as always, we’ll believe it when we have it in our labs.
Overall, Sparkle seems like a pretty promising company. They’ll be expanding into the US market soon. We’re pretty sure that we’ll be hearing more from them in the next year or so.