BFG GeForce 8800 GTX OC2

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Very fast
Stability	Very stable
Ease of Installation	Good - quick to install
Picture Quality	Excellent
Value For Money	Satisfactory

Advantages:	Great speed, the best for high resolution gaming, lifetime warrent  +  great customer support from BFG
Disadvantages:	Hot & can be loud, a large card (27cm)

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

The 8800GTX card from Nvidia has long been established as one of the best single-GPU cards in existence - in fact, the only single-GPU card that beats it is the 9800GTX, which has its own drawbacks, as I will explain below.
So how does the BFG 8800GTX OC2 differ from the rest of the menagerie that is the 8800GTX family? Well, first of all, it has significantly higher clock speeds, giving you great performance gains over both standard clocked brands, and many of the other stock overclocked brands. It is nearly at the top of the food chain as far as 8800GTX speeds go. As for how it competes in real-world gaming, I can play any game at full graphics settings with this beast of a graphics card, and every one of those with full anisotropic filtering, and at least some level of antialising (the latter on all games save for Crysis). It was released a few years ago now, but it's still up there as one of the 3 top GPU lines in existence.
And that's not all.
For why would you go for an 8800GTX, now that the new 9800GTX is out? There's a very good reason, and it's to do with memory. Many will notice with bemusement that Nvidia has released the 9800GTX a couple of specs short of the 8800GTX and Ultra, and the most obvious of these is the amount of video memory on the card. The New 9800 model has only 512mb, as opposed to the wholesome 768mb delivered on this and all 8800GTXs'. By cutting this down, they've made a quite serious error. The target market of both the 9800, and the 8800, GTX cards is the high-end gaming/enthusiast range. Now, a change is happening in the hardware world for these people; more and more people are investing in bigger and bigger screens, such that the once massive 24" screen is now fairly common among gamers. These screens, of course, need higher resolutions, and this is where the problem lies. Running games at higher resolutions, especially such hardware-hungry games as Crysis, requires more graphics memory. More, specifically, than the 9800GTX can sometimes provide. If you're hoping to run a game like COD4 or Crysis at the highest resolutions with full antialising on a 9800 model, think again. Even SLI, which is commonly the option gamers use to be able to play at higher resolutions on their large monitors, won't help you here; each 9800GTX you have, even in triple SLI, only has 512mb of memory. The 8800GTX is different. The 8800 has a lot of memory, and this means that it is the only option for enthusiast gamers who want to play the latest and greatest games at high resolutions with all the trappings like antialising. Dual or triple SLI 8800GTXs will outperform SLI'd 9800GTXs at those settings every time on the most hardware-challenging games. Even the gargantuan 9800GX2 doesn't match up to the 8800s, as each of the two GPUs on that card only has 512mb memory.

So, you want to play the latest games? You have a decent monitor? You're going to need one - or two - of these. And the BFG OC2 model is top of the bunch. The 8800s run hot, yes, and can be loud, but if you want the best, it's a necessary sacrifice. With BFG's lifetime warranty, even if you shove three of these in one machine and they cook themselves from all the heat, they'll still allow you to RMA them.