At this relatively early stage of the 7800 GTX all
of various vendors you could purchase a card from are using the NVIDIA reference
design. The natural question then becomes what differentiates the multitude of
differently branded offerings? The bundle is one thing to look at and BFG does a
decent job with it. Another area is of course the price of which BFG remains
competitive. Getting more bang for your buck in the way of overclocked hardware
like the BFG 7800 GTX OC is another. BFG never has included any kind of
out-of-the-box overclocking utility but
RivaTuner and
NVTweak do an
excellent job at that already and they're free. BFG has always touted their
Lifetime Warranty
which customers continue to praise. So, there are a number of ways one could go
when determining which card is the right one for them.
I didn't really touch on overclocking that much and again it was mainly due
to my CPU bottleneck. I was able to run everything rock solid at 495/1370 which
is on par with what others are seeing out of this card. I ran RTHDRIBL for 24
hours at 500/1370 with no problems at all.
I was able to bench 3DMark 2003 and 2005 at a core of 505MHz but that was not
stable in either F.E.A.R. or Dungeon Siege II. My 3DMark 2003 scores were 16,532
(default) and 17,568 (overclocked). 3DMark 2005 came in at 8,094 (default) and
8,348 (overclocked). The overclocked moniker of this card definitely rings true.
I hope this review was interesting and helpful in your decision making
process. BFG Technologies reputation is hard to beat and the BFG GeForce 7800
GTX OC is clearly an excellent product.
