A couple of weeks ago I was asking around on the forums for suggestions on a single slot graphics card for a build I was planning. The consensus was that the Radeon HD5670 would be the best bet, as I had originally specified ‘no external power required’. Now that I have a better understanding of power requirements, I was leaning toward the HD5770 as the best single slot solution. Or not…
The Sparkle One has recently made an appearance at CeBIT and despite an obvious handicap (seems it’s about 13 inches long) that will prevent it from being used inside most mini-ITX cases, it does bring a whole new level of performance to the single slot category.
The Sparkle One has similar specs to a standard dual-slot GTX 570, utilizing the same 40nm GF110 chip with 480 CUDA cores and 1280MB of GDDR5 memory with a 320-bit memory bus. Clock speeds are indicated as 752/1504MHz, slightly higher than the reference card. The Sparkle One also requires two 6 pin PCIe connectors and supports 3-way SLI. Reports put the TDP at 219w.
The single slot form does limit space for connections, but Sparkle managed to include one of each: DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort.
The Sparkle One is a whole lot of video card to pack into a single slot. Most ITX cases that offer a single expansion slot will probably not offer adequate ventilation to keep this thing cool.
Worry not, I’m sure that once it is available, someone, somewhere (probably right here) will jam this monster into a tiny mini-ITX case and see just what happens.