Sparkle's card carries "The Number of the Beast"

The IT industry is trying desperately to be politically correct. For instance, if you search the web for "sexa-core", the only proper (Latin) term for six core CPUs, you won't find a lot of sites, yet alone official company documents. Yet, you'll see quad-core and dual-core everywhere.

But the sexa-core affair isn't the first one. The players in the IT industry desperately tried to avoid "the number of the beast"  from Christian mythodology . A good example was Pentium III 667. Even though the processor worked at 666.35 MHz [in most cases], it was detected by many motherboards as "Intel Pentium III 667EB at 667 MHz". At the time, makers such as Abit and ASUS didn't understand what the fuss was about and listed the processor as "Intel Pentium III 667EB at 666 MHz", which made the thing even more hilarious.

Time went by and we saw occasional dodges of the infamous clock, until we received a press release from Misia Zheng, PR manager for Sparkle Computer. We won't go into the quality of English in this press release ["Unapproachable Cooling" - WTF?], the main point of the card was that the GPU is clocked at 666 MHz. The rest of specs call for 240 cores that are clocked in at 1.51 GHz each, and the memory is clocked at 1.27 GHz [2.52 GT/s result in 161.92 GB/s].

With this card, Sparkle is one of rare manufacturers that dared to use the conventional division - 333/666/999 MHz and did not resort to politically-correct antics. However, even the 666 MHz number cannot help Sparkle to beat the highest clocked cards on the market: the crown of the fastest GTX285 card stays with EVGA and Zotac, with their GT206 chips clocked at well over 700 MHz.