Board analysis

Top of the card

The botton of the card

Massive cooling on the card

While many of NVIDIA’s board partners are now overclocking their boards from the factory, BFG is the company that got it all started with their line of factory overclocked “OC” cards, starting with the BFG GeForce 6800 Ultra OC. Of course, that’s not the only first we can thank BFG for, they’re also the first to provide a true lifetime warranty on their products, and of course, they’ve also been providing 24/7 toll-free phone support for awhile now.

BFG’s GeForce 7800 GTX OC 512MB card is no exception to this, as BFG clocks their board from the factory higher than any other manufacturer to date. The graphics core on the 7800 GTX 512MB OC is clocked at 580MHz, that’s 30MHz higher than NVIDIA’s reference specifications for the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB. Meanwhile, the board’s memory operates at 875MHz (1.75GHz effective), a figure which is 25MHz higher than NVIDIA’s stock memory frequency, and 10MHz higher than the XFX GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB XXX Edition board we reviewed last week.

Back end of the board

Dual DVI connections

BFG fan up close

As a result of these changes, the BFG board boasts an even 56GB/sec of peak memory bandwidth (an improvement of nearly 2GB/sec over the stock GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB), while fill-rate improves from 13.2 Gigatexels/sec on stock 7800 GTX 512MB boards to 13.92 Gigatexels/sec on the BFG GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB OC.



These figures put BFG’s GeForce 7800 GTX OC 512MB in a class of its own in terms of performance. This is because as of right now, NVIDIA has only announced five launch partners for the GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB: ASUS, BFG, EVGA, MSI, and XFX. Of the five board partners, only BFG and XFX have chosen to overclock their 512MB cards from the factory (although we know for a fact that EVGA is working on releasing a factory overclocked 512MB “Black Pearl” card with liquid cooling). But BFG wasn’t content with just being the fastest on the block. On the contrary, they’ve put together quite a nice bundle of accessories to go along with their 7800 GTX 512MB OC card. Let’s go over those next shall we?

Accessories

With consumers forking over $700+ for a GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB right now, BFG had the presence of mind to put together a pretty nice collection of accessories to help make the purchase worth your hard-earned money. You see, also included with every GeForce 7800 GTX OC 512MB card is a free BFG T-shirt. Our board shipped with a black XL “Up All Nite” BFG T-shirt. To sweeten the package even further, BFG includes a free copy of Infinity Ward’s hit shooter Call of Duty 2 on DVD-ROM. With retailers charging a $10 premium for the DVD version of CoD 2 right now, this is a pretty sweet bonus in our opinion. But BFG doesn’t stop there as the card also comes with a packet containing 24 BFG Teflon Slick Pads. These pads can be used to give your mouse more traction.

The card ships with these hilarious stickers...

...which you can put on your graphics card

The rest of the bundle

Other software bundled with the card includes a copy of Ulead VideoStudio 9 SE for video editing duties and a copy of GameDrive 9.0, which allows you to play games without the CD. Additional hardware accessories include two DVI adapters, a component video cable for hooking the card up to an HDTV, VIVO cable, and power adapter.

Finally, BFG also ships the board with stickers which you can attach to the card. For instance, once sticker hilariously reads “My big f’n gun” or “OMGWTFBFGSAUCE”.