All That Glitters Is…
Of all the things you would find in a PC, the video system is one that has changed the most. From a simple chip on the motherboard that spat text onto the screen, the video subsystem has grown and evolved into something that could rightly be called a computer within a computer. Though 3D graphics have hit something of a temporary plateau, there’s still plenty of improvement to be had. NVIDIA has risen to the challenge, with their latest line of Fermi-based graphics cards. Their top-end cards have plenty of power to spare, but this comes at a pretty hefty premium.
$500 is not much to pay for someone determined to have the best of the best, but this only describes a handful of well-off individuals. The rest of us have to make trade-offs; naturally, we want the biggest bang for our buck. Cards like the GeForce GTX 465 exist to fill that niche; they offer performance that’s fairly close to their top-end brethren for a more reasonable price.
Sparkle’s sent us a card that looks to be gunning for that market of enthusiastic-gamer-who-isn’t-filthy-rich, based on the GeForce GTX 465 reference design.
Sparkle GeForce GTX 465
Sparkle’s Take
Sparkle’s product page is fairly light on the ad-copy; all we really get is a list of features, reproduced faithfully below:
Key Features
- Microsoft DirectX 11 support
- NVIDIA CUDA technology with CUDA C/C++,DirectCompute 5.0 and OpenCL support
- NVIDIA PhysX technology
- NVIDIA SLI and 3-way SLI technology
- NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround Ready
- NVIDIA PureVideo HD technology
- PCI Express 2.0 support
- Two Dual-link DVI-I connectors
- One Mini-HDMI 1.3a connector
- Dual-link HDCP-Capable
- OpenGL 4.0 Optimization and support
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by TWLDotCom. TWLDotCom said: Sparkle GeForce GTX 465 Video Card http://shar.es/mR26E A good card at not too high a cost. Is it worth your money? Find out. [...]