BFG Tech GeForce 6800 GT OC

Even when I had just heard the name BFG Tech for the first time, I knew that the company planned on doing something different, being a different kind of hardware company. I mean, it sure as hell better be with a name that uses those three letters in its name, right?

Well, BFG really is a different kind of company, at least it seems to be from my perspective (from the outside trying to look in). The company is made up of gamers, so they really do care about releasing top-quality products. Quality isn't their only concern though. Performance is right up at the top as well, as is evidenced by their newest line of "OC" (or overclocked) GeForce 6800 cards. All of BFG's current 6 series cards come only in the "OC" flavors currently. That's right; there's a 6800 OC, 6800 GT OC and a 6800 Ultra OC. All of these cards are of course overclocked right out of the box (when compared to other 6800s clocked at default reference clock speeds).

That means if you decide to purchase a BFG GeForce 6 series card, the overclocking is already done for you, and you get extra performance for your buck. It's a great idea for end-users who aren't comfortable with overclocking their expensive new cards manually. Today, I'll be taking a look the BFG GeForce 6800 GT OC and comparing it to the Sapphire X800 Pro that I recently reviewed. The 6800 GT OC's core is clocked 20MHz higher than stock (so it's at 370 instead of 350MHz), but the memory clock is unchanged. Read on to see just how well this baby pushes pixels through its 16 rendering pipelines.

Features at a Glance

Minimum 300W PSU

The Card, Package Contents and Installation

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While I did receive a retail card and package, I didn't receive retail box. Rather than show you the plain white box I received, I'll just show you what the retail box is going to look like.

The card itself features VGA, DVI and S-video output. There is a nice little fan and slab of metal on top of the GPU and memory chips to keep everything as cool as possible. You do have to plug it into your power supply, but only one power connector is necessary. The card is pretty long, especially when compared to the X800 Pro, so small form factor (SFF) and other small system users might have some problems with that. If you've used other long GeForce cards in your system though, this one will fit just fine.

As is typical with BFG packages, there isn't really a whole lot of 'extra' stuff, but that's okay because some people like and actually prefer it that way. The basics, like manual, DVI-to-VGA adapter, "Y" power cable and driver CD, are included, along with NVIDIA NVDVD 2.0 and a CD with game demos on it.

Package Contents

Game Demos - Painkiller, Silent Storm and Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow

Installation

Installation was as easy and trouble-free as any good video card install should be these days. Once you install the card, boot up your PC and pop in the included driver CD, all you have to do is click "Install Drivers" and away you go. The drivers included on the CD happened to be ForceWare 61.21, so I went ahead and installed them.

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