Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series Review

1. Introduction2. Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series 3. Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series (Super High Res Gallery)4. Testing Methodology5. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven Benchmark6. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage7. Synthetic: 3DMark 118. Image Quality: HQV Benchmark 2.09. Gaming: F1 2011 (1080p)10. Gaming: Alien V Predator (1080p)11. Gaming: Tom Clancy HAWX 212. Gaming: Resident Evil 5 (1080p)13. Gaming: Far Cry 2 (1200p)14. Gaming: Total War Shogun 2 (1080p)15. Gaming: Battlefield 3 (1080p)16. Technical: Thermal Dynamics17. Technical: Acoustics Performance18. Technical: Power Consumption19. Closing Thoughts20. View All Pages

Sparkle. Not a name that may immediately spring to mind when discussing a new video card release, however there was a time when they had some market presence in Europe. The company are refocusing their strategy and relaunching their brand name with a series of exciting, upcoming video cards. Today we are looking at their GTX650 OC Dragon Series, which is supplied in a pre-overclocked state. This card looks to be ideal for a high performance, cool running media center and today we put it through the paces.

It may not be well known however Sparkle have been used as an OEM for EVGA, Chaintech and Point of View solutions in the past.

They clearly have some talent when it comes to producing graphics cards so today we aim to find out if the GTX650 OC Dragon Series is worth the modest £90 asking price.

While it is always fun to review £500 flagship graphics cards, the sub £100 market is one of the most important for both AMD and Nvidia. Remember, they sell a huge volume of video cards to a wide audience who just want an inexpensive, yet capable video card.

The Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series solution looks to be ideal for a low cost enthusiast gaming system or media center, but can it power gaming engines at true 1080p resolutions? Today we aim to find out.

Product	Nvidia GTX670	Gigabyte GTX 660 Ti OC Windforce	Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series	MSI GTX660 OC Twin Frozr
Transistors	3540m	3540m	1300m	3540m
Core Clock	915 mhz+	1033 mhz+	1058mhz (1098mhz)	980mhz+ (1033mhz+)
Memory clock	1,502mhz	1,502mhz	1250mhz	1502mhz
Shaders	1344	1344	384	960
ROPs	32	24	16	24
Memory	2GB	2GB	1GB	2GB
Memory bus width	256 bit	192 bit	128 bit	192 bit

The Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series is supplied in an overclocked state , with a core clock increase from 1,058mhz on the reference card to 1,098mhz. The card ships with 1GB of 1,250mhz GDDR5 (5GBps effective) which is connected across a 128 bit memory interface.

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.

On this page we present some super high resolution images of the product taken with the 24.5MP Nikon D3X camera and 24-70mm ED lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later.

To test today we are using our long standing Core i7 970 system, which is overclocked. We have a variety of hardware benchmarked on this system this year which will make for an interesting market comparison.

It is worth reiterating that the Sparkle GTX650 OC is less than £90, some of the cards in our market comparison cost well over five times the price.

Main Test System:

Processor: Core i7 970 @ 4.6ghz
Graphics: Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series
Cooling: Coolit Vantage
Motherboard: MSI X58A-GD65
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10
Power Supply: Corsair AX1200
Memory: 6GB ADATA @ 2133mhz 9-10-9-32
Storage: Kingston SSDNow V+ 512GB Gen 2 SSD (Storage) / Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (OS boot)
Monitor: Dell U3011.

Comparison Cards:
KFA2 GTX680 LTD OC
Asus GTX680
Asus GTX670 Direct CU II TOP
Gigabyte GTX 660 Ti OC Windforce
MSI GTX 660 OC Edition Twin Frozr
Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition
HD7970 GHZ Edition
HD7970
Sapphire HD7950 Vapor-X Edition (@950mhz core clock)
HD7950
Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition
HD7870
HD7850
HD6990 (880 core)
HD6970
HD6950
HD6870
Sapphire HD7770 Vapor X Overclock Edition
XFX HD7770 Black Edition S CFx
HD7770 CFx
HD7770
Sapphire HD7750 Ultimate Edition
HD6790
HD6770
HD6670
GTX590 SLi
GTX590
GTX580 SLi
GTX580
GTX570

Software:

Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
3DMark Vantage
3DMark 11
Fraps Professional
Steam Client
FurMark

Games:

Alien V Predator
Tom Clancy HAWX 2
Resident Evil 5
Far Cry 2
F1 2011
Total War: Shogun 2
Battlefield 3
Elder Scrolls V: SkyRim

All the latest BIOS updates and drivers are used during testing. We perform generally under real world conditions, meaning KitGuru tests games across five closely matched runs and then average out the results to get an accurate median figure. If we use scripted benchmarks, they are mentioned on the relevant page.

Some game descriptions are edited from Wikipedia.

Unigine provides an interesting way to test hardware. It can be easily adapted to various projects due to its elaborated software design and flexible toolset. A lot of their customers claim that they have never seen such extremely-effective code, which is so easy to understand.

Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 GPU benchmark based on advanced Unigine engine from Unigine Corp. It reveals the enchanting magic of floating islands with a tiny village hidden in the cloudy skies. Interactive mode provides emerging experience of exploring the intricate world of steampunk.

Efficient and well-architected framework makes Unigine highly scalable:

• Multiple API (DirectX 9 / DirectX 10 / DirectX 11 / OpenGL) render
• Cross-platform: MS Windows (XP, Vista, Windows 7) / Linux
• Full support of 32bit and 64bit systems
• Multicore CPU support
• Little / big endian support (ready for game consoles)
• Powerful C++ API
• Comprehensive performance profiling system
• Flexible XML-based data structures

We use the following settings: 1920×1080 resolution. Anti Aliasing off. Anisotrophy 4, Tessellation normal. Shaders High. Stereo 3D disabled. API: Direct X 11.

Performance of the card is much as we would expect, around 3 fps more than the AMD HD6790, and not too far behind the AMD HD6870, both last generation cards. The AMD HD7770 1GHZ card is around 7 frames per second faster although the Sapphire HD7750 Ultimate Edition is around 2 frames per second slower.

Futuremark released 3DMark Vantage, on April 28, 2008. It is a benchmark based upon DirectX 10, and therefore will only run under Windows Vista (Service Pack 1 is stated as a requirement) and Windows 7. This is the first edition where the feature-restricted, free of charge version could not be used any number of times. 1280×1024 resolution was used with performance settings.

The Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series manages to beat the HD7750 Ultimate Edition from Sapphire, scoring around 1,500 points more.

3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading.

After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.

If you want to learn more about this benchmark, or to buy it yourself, head over to this page.

The Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series graphics card scores 3,131 points which is slightly more than the AMD HD6790, and a couple of hundred points less than the AMD HD7770 1GHZ.

HQV Benchmark 2.0 is an updated version of the original tool and it consists of various video clips and test patterns which are designed to evalute motion correction, de-interlacing, decoding, noise reduction, detail enhancement and film cadence detection.

There are two versions of the program, standard definition on DVD and high definition on Bluray. As our audience will be concentrating on HD content so will we.

This has a total of 39 video tests which is increased from 23 in the original and the scoring is also up from a total of 130 to 210. As hardware and software gets more complicated, the software has been tuned to make sure we can thoroughly maximise our analysis.

Read our initial analysis over here.

	Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series
Dial	4
Dial with static pattern	5
Gray Bars	5
Violin	5
Stadium 2:2	5
Stadium 3:2	5
Horizontal Text Scroll	3
Vertical Text Scroll	5
Transition to 3:2 Lock	5
Transition to 2:2 Lock	0
2:2:2:4 24 FPS DVCAM Video	5
2:3:3:2 24 FPS DVCam Video	5
3:2:3:2:2 24 FOS Vari-Speed	5
5:5 FPS Animation	5
6:4 12 FPS Animation	5
8:7 8 FPS Animation	5
Interlace Chroma Problem (ICP)	5
Chroma Upsampling Error (CUE)	5
Random Noise: Sailboat	5
Random Noise: Flower	5
Random Noise: Sunrise	5
Random Noise: Harbour Night	5
Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Text Pattern/ Scrolling Text	5
Roller Coaster	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Bridge Traffic	5
Luminance Frequency Bands	5
Chrominance Frequency Bands	5
Vanishing Text	5
Resolution Enhancement	15
Theme Park	5
Driftwood	5
Ferris Wheel	5
Skin Tones	5
Total	192

The hardware scores 192 points out of a possible 210 which is excellent.

F1 2011 is the newest Direct X 11 racing game from industry pioneers CodeMasters. The 2011 Formula One season is the 62nd FIA Formula One season. The original calendar consisted of twenty rounds, including the inaugural running of the Indian Grand Prix before the cancellation of the Bahrain Grand Prix. Pirelli returns to the sport as tyre supplier for all teams, taking over from Bridgestone. Red Bull Racing are the reigning Constructor’s Champions. Red Bull Racing’s Sebastian Vettel is the defending Drivers’ Champion, one of five World Champions appearing on the grid.

While the Sparkle GTX650 OC is positioned close to the bottom of the performance pile, we need to look at the bigger picture. A £90 card is able to maintain a 30> frame rate at 1080p, with 8 times anti aliasing enabled and eye candy maxed.

Aliens V Predator has proved to be a big seller since the release and Sega have taken the franchise into new territory after taking it from Sierra. AVP is a Direct X 11 supported title and delivers not only advanced shadow rendering but high quality tessellation for the cards on test today.

To test the cards we used a 1080p resolution with DX11, Texture Quality Very High, MSAA Samples 1, 16 af, ambient occulsion on, shadow complexity high, motion blur on. We use this with most of our graphics card testing so results are comparable throughout reviews.

This is an extremely demanding Direct X 11 engine which requires powerful hardware at these settings. The Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series is unable to maintain a perfectly smooth frame rate at all times, although it does a commendable job for 97% of the section we tested. It dropped a couple of times below the sweet spot of 25 frames per second.

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. 2 is an arcade-style flight action game developed by Ubisoft Romania and published by Ubisoft. After the events of the first game, the H.A.W.X squadron is sent to Middle East, where a high level of violence is being registered, and the appearance of various insurgents leaders in various hotspots. The team also has to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Russian nuclear weapons. The player will be controlling three groups: one American (Hunter), one British (Munro) and one Russian (Sokov), each with its own pilots and supporting characters. There will also be references to other characters in the Tom Clancy universe.

We are testing in full DX11 mode with all settings to maximum.

HAWX 2 is a title which has favoured Nvidia hardware in the past. The Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series manages to outperform the Sapphire HD7750 Ultimate Edition, averaging 51 frames per second. Again we need to focus on the point that this card is capable of maintaining perfectly smooth (30+) frame rates at 1080p with a high level of image quality enabled.

Resident Evil 5, known in Japan as Biohazard 5, is a survival horror third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The game is the seventh installment in the Resident Evil survival horror series, and was released on March 5, 2009 in Japan and on March 13, 2009 in North America and Europe for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. A Windows version of the game was released on September 15, 2009 in North America, September 17 in Japan and September 18 in Europe. Resident Evil 5 revolves around Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar as they investigate a terrorist threat in Kijuju, a fictional town in Africa.

Within its first three weeks of release, the game sold over 2 million units worldwide and became the best-selling game of the franchise in the United Kingdom. As of December, 2009, Resident Evil 5 has sold 5.3 million copies worldwide since launch, becoming the best selling Resident Evil game ever made.

This Direct X 10 engine was perfectly playable at 1080p with 8 times anti aliasing enabled, averaging 67 frames per second. We are seeing a pattern now. The Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series is slightly faster than the AMD HD7750, but a little slower than the HD7770.

Far Cry 2 (commonly abbreviated as “FC2 or “fc2″) is an open-ended first-person shooter developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It was released on October 21, 2008 in North America and on October 23, 2008 in Europe and Australia. It was made available on Steam on October 22, 2008. Crytek, the developers of the original game, were not involved in the development of Far Cry 2.

Ubisoft has marketed Far Cry 2 as the true sequel to Far Cry, though the sequel has very few noticeable similarities to the original game. Instead, it features completely new characters and setting, as well as a new style of gameplay that allows the player greater freedom to explore different African landscapes such as deserts, jungles, and savannas. The game takes place in a modern-day East African nation in a state of anarchy and civil war. The player takes control of a mercenary on a lengthy journey to locate and assassinate “The Jackal,” a notorious arms dealer.

Far Cry 2 is still a popular game and the open world environment can be taxing on even the latest hardware available today.

Settings: 1920×1200, D3D10, Disable Artificial Intelligence(No), Full Screen, Anti-Aliasing(8x), VSync(No), Overall Quality(Ultra High), Vegetation(Very High), Shading(Ultra High), Terrain(Ultra High), Geometry(Ultra High), Post FX(High), Texture(Ultra High), Shadow(Ultra High), Ambient(High), Hdr(Yes), Bloom(Yes), Fire(Very High), Physics(Very High), RealTrees(Very High).

At these settings Far Cry 2 isn't playable via the AMD HD6770 or AMD HD6670, and the HD7750 delivers borderline performance. The Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series is much stronger with this title, averaging 51 frames per second and maintaining a 30> frame rate at all times. Again this is an impressive result for a £90 card, especially at 1200p with 8 times anti aliasing enabled.

Shogun 2 is set in 16th-century feudal Japan, in the aftermath of the Ōnin War. The country is fractured into rival clans led by local warlords, each fighting for control. The player takes on the role of one of these warlords, with the goal of dominating other factions and claiming his rule over Japan. The standard edition of the game will feature a total of eight factions (plus a ninth faction for the tutorial), each with a unique starting position and different political and military strengths.

We use the built in STEAM benchmark with this game, so you can compare directly against your own hardware.

This game really does need a £200 graphics card to get the most from it at 1080p. The Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series struggles to maintain good frame rates at these settings.

720p delivers better results, averaging over 50 frames per second and holding smooth frame rates at all times.

According to EA, Battlefield 3 garnered 3 million pre-orders by the day of its release. It is unknown at present whether these figures are worldwide or just for the US. The pre-order total makes it “the biggest first-person shooter launch in EA history”, according to the publisher. The engine is beautiful on the PC and very demanding of the partnering hardware.

Battlefield runs quite well at these settings, although some of the minimum frame rate drops can cause juddering through some of the environmental sections.

The tests were performed in a controlled air conditioned room with temperatures maintained at a constant 24c – a comfortable environment for the majority of people reading this.

Idle temperatures were measured after sitting at the desktop for 30 minutes. Load measurements were acquired by playing Crysis 2 for 30 minutes and measuring the peak temperature. We also have included Furmark results, recording maximum temperatures throughout a 30 minute stress test. All fan settings were left on automatic.

The heatsink on this card is rather small, which has a slightly negative effect on the temperatures.  That said, when gaming, the core peaks at around 67c which is perfectly acceptable, rising to 75c when tasked with the synthetic Furmark stress test.

We have changed our method of measuring noise levels. We have built a system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on our CPU. The motherboard is also passively cooled. This gives us a build with almost completely passive cooling and it means we can measure noise of just the graphics card inside the system when we run looped 3dMark tests.

Ambient noise in the room is around 20-25dBa. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the closed chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation.

Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the video card. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

The Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series is quiet when idle, and the fan slowly spins up under load to generate 32.2dBa of noise. This will be drowned out when installed in a chassis. Furmark tasks the fan further, although these aren't realistic every day situations.

To test power consumption today we are using a Keithley Integra unit and we measure power consumption from the VGA card inputs, not the system wide drain. We measure results while gaming in Crysis 2 and record the results.

The Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series is an extremely efficient discrete solution, only demanding around 40W of power when gaming. This really is ideal for a media center environment or when building into a space restrictive chassis.

The Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series will prove an ideal purchase for gamers on a strict budget, or for the growing audience who are building a new low cost, low noise, media center.

Nvidia and AMD acquire the majority portion of their sales in the sub £100 market, so these cards are incredibly important for both system builders and channel partners targeting specific price points. Competitive pricing combined with reasonable performance and low power drain are key selling points in this cut throat sector of the market.

The Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series on a performance level is positioned between AMD's HD7750 and HD7770. It certainly isn't going to set the benchmarking world alight, however when we factor in the £90 asking price then it really does make a lot of sense. Students with only a modest amount of cash to spare, or people building a secondary system for the living room will find this solution very appealing.

While Nvidia will never claim this card is designed specifically for 1080p gaming, our testing has highlighted that many currently available game engines run perfectly fine at 1920×1080 with a modest amount of eye candy enabled. Almost every game we tested today with the GTX650 at 1080p delivered a smooth real world gaming experience above thirty frames per second, even when tasked with anti aliasing.

When we look back through hardware history in the last 10 years, these low end, budget oriented discrete solutions were never capable of powering true high definition resolutions. Obviously there will be situations with Direct X 11 engines for instance, when the restricted 128 bit memory interface and reduced shader processing power will limit frame rates, but generally it is surprisingly capable.

Sparkle have supplied their GTX650 OC Dragon Series card with a modest core clock boost and their fan profile is non aggressive. While temperatures may rise to 67c under load, the fan never spins fast enough to emit a high level of noise, ideal for a media center environment. I really do loathe watching movies with distracting fan noise in the background.

It is worth pointing out that onboard graphics solutions just don't make the grade for me, as I crave the highest image quality possible, only achievable from either Nvidia or AMD discrete solutions. The GTX650 delivers stunning image quality when viewing bluray discs, perfect for partnering up with a 40 inch+ high definition television set.

In closing, Sparkle GTX650 OC Dragon Series is ideal as a low cost solution for a media center or entry level gaming system. It comes highly recommended.

Available from ARIA for £89.94 inc vat.

Pros:

• Low power drain.
• quiet.
• inexpensive.

Cons:

• Lacks grunt with demanding Direct X 11 titles.

Kitguru says: It is all about the price, for less than £90, this is a sweet deal.

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