Sparkle has today announced a new range of passively cooled Nvidia GeForce 8600GT graphics cards. The oversized heatsinks are as big as the card itself and promise to effectively dissipate heat. They look like they will indeed do the job rather well.

The three models all use the same cooler but vary on the amount and type of onboard memory and display connectors. The SF-PX86GT256D3-HP Passive is at the top of the line with 256MB GDDR3 memory and dual DVI-I connectors. SF-PX86GT256U2-HP Passive and SF-PX86GT512U2-HP Passive both just include single DVI-I connectors and use slower DDR2 memory (256MB and 512MB respectively).

You would think, since these cards produce zero noise and hence a perfection edition to any HTPC, that they would include native HDMI port but unfortunately they do not. It is unclear whether or not Sparkle include a DVI to HDMI adapter in the package or not but we hope they end up doing so.

SPARKLE GeForce 8600 GT passive cooling graphic cards use NVIDIA second-generation PureVideo HD technology, to bring untouchable HD video experience to users. They can deliver the highest-quality playback of HD DVD and Blu-ray movies on mainstream PCs. The new programmable video processing engine takes on all of the high definition H.264 HD video
decoding, freeing the CPU to perform other tasks and significantly reducing power consumption, heat, and noise.