Introduction and 8800 GT OCX TI

Introduction

To say that the graphics market has shifted a bit in the last month would be quite an understatement.  We have gone from a somewhat stagnate field of competitors living off the GPUs built on G80 and R600 to the era of NVIDIA’s GT200-based GTX 200-series and AMD’s RV770-based HD 4800-series cards.  Just prior to those releases BFG sent over a pair of new cards that might seem a bit out dated but still have the power and pricing needed to get some attention.

This review of both of these new cards, the BFG GeForce 9600 GT OCX TI and the BFG GeForce 8800 GT OCX TI, will focus on how these new additions from BFG differ from any previous reference models of their respective GPUs and how they fit into today’s highly fluid market of graphics cards.

What exactly does all that suffix terminology get you exactly?  BFG’s “OCX” brand indicates their fastest overclocked models and the “TI (ThermoIntelligence)” brand is for unique (non-reference) cooling designs. 

BFG GeForce 8800 GT OCX ThermoIntelligence

When I saw the name of this card come across the test bed I had to do a double take, as I imagine many of you did as well.  Yes, this is a brand new 8800 GT card built around the same G92 GPU that found its way into the 9800 GTX and 9800 GX2 cards later last year. 

You’ll notice at first glance that the cooler is definitely different than stock design – BFG went to a custom design that is both very functional and quiet.  As the clear fan design will clearly indicate to serious PC enthusiasts, there is an LED light hidden in the fan that will illuminate your case with a nice NVIDIA green color when powered up. 

Even though the bracket for the 8800 GT card is only a single slot, the cooler design definitely makes this a two slot solution.

Both of the DVI outputs are dual-link and support resolutions up to 2560x1600.  The single TV output supports standard definition S-Video or HD output with the included dongle.

The 8800 GT uses a single 6-pin PCIe power connection only.

Our shot of GPU-Z here shows the 8800 GT running at much higher than originally specified speeds.  The main GPU core is running at 700 MHz while the shaders are running at 1728 MHz!  The GDDR3 memory is clocked at 1000 MHz.   The original reference speeds of this GPU were 600 MHz core, 1500 MHz shader and 900 MHz memory clocks - this card is DEFINITELY going to be faster that most 8800 GT judging by these numbers!

Next Page - 9600 GT OCX ThermoIntelligence