Sparkle GeForce 9800 GTX+ Graphics Card Review

"The Sparkle 9800 GTX+ did quite well in our games tested today, overall it proved about 15% faster than the previous generation high end 8800 GTX, luckily it doesn’t come with a very high price tag. We spotted it for €152 in Europe and $180 in the USA, and amongst other Geforce 9800 GTX+ offerings the Sparkle is very sharply priced. The direct competitor for the GTX+ is an overclocked Radeon HD 4850 512Mb card, while a reference clocked HD 4850 is noticeably cheaper (€130/$150) it’s also slower than the new GTX+. A factory overclocked HD 4850 starts at around ~€160/$200 making it more expensive than the card tested here. There’s no denying that the current 9800 GTX+ pricing seen is thanks to the ATI’s aggressive pricing.

Until we’ve had an opportunity to put an overclocked HD 4850 against the GTX+ we can’t draw final conclusion, what we can say though is that the Sparkle 9800 GTX+ is a very capable graphics card able to run the latest games fluently at relatively high resolutions. Sparkle’s custom version adds a capable cooling and native HDMI support which makes it quite future proof. If you hunger for more they also have a Calibre P980X+ version which comes with higher GPU/MEM/Shader clocks (761/1161/1911)."