Today is 9800 GT day and Sparkle showed us that this rebrand launch can be exciting after all. They announced no less than 10 different 9800 GT based cards. I'm not sure if the card we got is one of the illustrious ten (too many similar names), but this one looks interesting. The card is reference clocked, 600/900/1500MHz for the GPU/memory/shaders, but it features a passive cooler with four heatpipes.



Even if it is passively cooled, we saw it can keep the GPU temperature under 80°C under load. Idle temperature is just under 58°C.



Nvidia's 9800GT comes in two flavors, as a 55nm version of the G92 GPU, dubbed G92b (G9E), but also in the guise of the good old 65nm version. The card we got is manufactured on 65nm, which means there is no support for HybridPower (not a big deal if you don't have an Nvidia chipset which supports HybridPower). It scores P4741 marks in Futuremark's Vantage test.



The cooler looks great and it has no trouble keeping the 65nm GPU cool.



Stay tuned for more.

Updated: We found more time to play with the Sparkle's 9800 GT card, and after we took the cooler off, we saw the 55nm GPU behind. More here.