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BFGTech GeForce 8800 GT OCX ThermoIntelligence

BFGTech has married OCX with ThermoIntelligence. We're here to evaluate the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GT OCX with ThermoIntelligence in three of today's hottest games. Find out if this supped up 8800 GT has what it takes to compete with the newly released ATI Radeon HD 4850, or is it time for the 8800 GT to take a hike?

Introduction

With high-quality products, solid support, and lifetime warranties BFGTech has carved a place for themselves out of the ferocious North American video card market. Their "by gamers, for gamers" philosophy and close relationship with NVIDIA has established BFG Technologies as a premium video card brand in the USA. Their own website states:

Many of our employees are gamers and PC enthusiasts, and we provide hardware and marketing that reflects our passion and excitement for the latest technology.

BFGTech produces video cards, motherboards, power supplies, and a host of other accessories. For this evaluation, we're taking a good long look at the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GT OCX with ThermoIntelligence.

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT GPU

Launched in October 2007, the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT GPU is manufactured on a 65 nanometer process, packing 754 million transistors. It boasts 112 streaming processors running at 1.5 GHz, and 16 ROPs and 56 texturing units running at 600MHz. It comes standard with 512MB of GDDR3 memory running on a 256-bit wide, 1.8GHz bus offering 57GB per second memory through-put and 256MB models are also available.

It was introduced to supplement the aging G80-based GeForce 8800 GTS, though at a smaller introductory price at around $250 USD. Since then, street prices have fallen dramatically, to as low as $69.99 USD after MIR for a 256MB model, or $149.99 USD for a 512MB model.

Interestingly, the GeForce 8800 GT offers better performance than the old GeForce 8800 GTS, even though it was more expensive. Then, shortly after launching the GeForce 8800 GT, NVIDIA further muddled the waters by introducing a G92 GPU and giving it the same name as the old G80-based GeForce 8800 GTS, but with 512MB of memory instead of 640MB or 320MB. The actual differences between these products and their respective performance envelopes proved razor thin, and confuses consumers to this day.

BFGTech GeForce 8800 GT OCX with ThermoIntelligence

This video card bears BFGTech’s OCX moniker, and therefore belongs to its highest level of overclocked video cards. The GPU core is overclocked by 100MHz to 700MHz, and the streaming processors are overclocked by 230MHz to 1.73GHz. The memory on this video card is overclocked by 200MHz, up to 2.0GHz from 1.8GHz.

BFGTech first introduced us to their ThermoIntelligence line with a GeForce 8600 GTS. When we tested it, we found that it worked, and in fact worked better than advertised. So, with this video card, we were quite curious to see if the new design is as effective for the GeForce 8800 GT as the old design was for the 8600 GTS and see how high we can overclock.

The box this video card came in is conspicuously small. It is also lacking in any kind of heroic or diabolical imagery often found on the front of video card boxes. Instead, there is a large decal covering almost the entire front of the box, describing the contents and listing the system requirements. This label is standard fare for e-tail packaging these days. Retail shelved units will depict a full graphical theme.

The bundle is also quite average. Included are a pair of DVI to VGA adaptors, the requisite NVIDIA HDTV output dongle, and a dual-Molex to single 6-pin auxiliary power adaptor for those without appropriately equipped power supplies. There is also a small black folder containing various quick-start guides and a driver CD, labeled “v6.4”.

The video card is precisely the same height and length of any other GeForce 8800 GT based video card. The only thing that has physically changed on this video card is the cooling device. It is 9" long and 4" tall. With the cooler, it will take up two slots on your motherboard, even though it has only a single-slot PCI expansion bracket.

The cooler itself is a radical departure from the standard NVIDIA brick-shaped design. It features a radial heat-sink design with many thin aluminum fins and a heat-pipe running throughout. The fan is quite a bit larger than that of the reference cooler, and is made of crystal-clear plastic. There is also a large, cast aluminum heat-sink covering the DRAM chips and some smaller, milled heat sinks covering the power circuitry. The entire design is open, allowing air to flow freely from the fan, through the radial heat-sink, and over the memory heat sink as well. It is worth noting that the black fins appear to be attached only to the heat-pipe. Affixing this assembly to the video card is a large steel bracket which is attached to the PCB through the back-side with spring-loaded screws.

Looking closely, we can see that the clear plastic piece which guides air out to the fins has a ZEROtherm label on it. Browsing ZEROtherm's product listing, the device which looks most similar to the one employed by BFGTech is the GX815, though it shows copper colored fins and heatpipes, whereas our sample has black fins and a chrome colored heatpipe.

At the business end of the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GT OCX, we see a pair of dual-link DVI connectors and an HDTV/Composite video output header. The back of the video card is characteristically uninteresting aside from numerous stickers and retention pins and screws for the various cooling apparatus.

And finally, if you turn the lights out in your game room or home office, you will find that there is a bright green LED that lights up the clear plastic fan on this video card.

The Competition

For this evaluation, we want to answer a few simple questions. First, does BFG’s OCX clock speed amount to any noticeable gameplay improvement? Second, does the ThermoIntelligence cooler provide significantly better cooling and acoustic performance than the stock NVIDIA cooler? Third and last, if the answers to the first two questions are yes, do those improvements translate to enhanced value not only over other GeForce 8800 GT based video cards, but also the newly released ATI Radeon HD 4850, which can be had for a mere $5 more than the BFGTech video card we are evaluating today.

To answer those questions, we are comparing the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GT OCX with ThermoIntelligence directly to a standard NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT and a standard ATI Radeon HD 4850.