KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
We like the new box artwork, a fire breathing dragon. It may be slightly reminiscent of Zotac artwork, but it works well in a retail store environment, especially with younger kids.
A very sparse bundle, a software/driver disc and quick install guide. We recommend you grab the latest Forceware drivers from Nvidia's website however.
The Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series is built around a tiny dark blue PCB with a silver and black cooler taking centerstage. It is reassuring to notice that Sparkle are using a large fan. This fan can also be popped out of the shroud for easy cleaning.
The Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series takes power from a single 6 pin PCI power connector. Sadly it isn't SLI capable as there is no connector on the PCB.
A single slot I/O panel has output for two DVI connectors and a mini HDMI port.
The little PCB has 1GB of Samsung GDDR5 memory on board. The cooler is a simple design with no heatpipes, just a smoothed section positioned in the middle of a block. The large fan is positioned directly above this block.
The Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series is based around the GK107 processor with a modest 384 CUDA cores, manufactured on the 28nm process. This particular ‘OC’ model has received a core clock increase to 1,098mhz. It ships with 1GB of GDDR5 memory connected via a 128 bit interface.
