Sparkle GeForce 9600 GT Calibre (Calibre P960 GBOX)
The P960 from Sparkle is the fastest 9600 GT in our benchmark suite and the one with the quietest active cooling solution. The cooler, with its double fan, only reaches a noise volume of 36.3 dB(A), which is about the level of ambient noise (including the PC’s power supply and hard drive) under idle conditions. Even with 3D applications, the noise level does not go up, staying at a soft 36.3 dB(A).
Reference clocks for a 9600 GT are: GPU at 650 MHz, memory at 900 MHz, and shader 1,625 MHz. Sparkle overclocks the Calibre to a 700 MHz GPU speed, 1,000 MHz memory, and no less than 1,850 MHz on the shaders. In the tests, this results in about 8% to 9% increase in overall performance compared to a 9600 GT with standard settings.
The GeForce 9600 GT (G94) graphics chip supports Shader Model 4.0 and DirectX 10. Sparkle equips the test card with 512 MB of DDR3 graphics memory, which is sufficient for resolutions of up to 1920x1200 pixels. The overclocked settings are anchored in the BIOS of the card, and don’t change with different driver versions. One nice feature is that the card comes with a little control unit that lets you recall the Nvidia standard settings, or an energy-saving Green setting by simply pressing a button.
