Packaging

The Card

Sparkle's B570 Guardian OC comes with a fantastic-looking blue color theme—I really love how the various shades of blue come together. On the back you get a high-quality metal backplate with a cutout for air to flow through.


Dimensions of the card are 24.0 x 14.0 cm, and it weighs 788 g.


Installation requires three slots in your system. We measured the card's width to be 45 mm.


Display connectivity includes three standard DisplayPort 2.1 and one HDMI 2.1a. On the Intel reference card one port is marked with a black outline, but not on this card. That port supports higher bitrates (UHBR13.5), i.e. 4K up to 360 Hz, while the other two ports support up to 240 Hz, so I guess you have to test them to find the right one (if you have a monitor that requires such high transfer rates).

In terms of codecs, you get full support for H.264, H.265, VP9 and AV1, both encode and decode. Worth highlighting is HEVC 4:2:2 10-bit encoding and decoding, which is a unique capability, and AV1 Screen Content encoding, which improves the quality of text in movies—fantastic for screen recordings or screen sharing.


The card uses a single 8-pin connector, plus PCIe slot power, allowing a maximum power draw of 225 W.

Teardown

The cooler uses four heatpipes and provides cooling for the GPU, memory and VRM circuitry.


On the back, you'll find a metal backplate with a cutout to improve airflow.