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BFG GeForce 7900 GTX OC 512MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Tuesday, 06 June 2006 |
TheTechLounge comes out with a review on the BFG GeForce 7900 GTX OC 512MB PCIe graphics card. A couple of months ago, NVIDIA launched three new video cards the GeForce 7900 GTX, GT and the GeForce 7600 GT. The GTX, of course, is the highest-end card, with a street price of $500. The GeForce 7900 GT is what you could call an affordable high-end card, priced at about $350. The GeForce 7600 GT is their new mid-range card, and you can buy it for around $200. As you may recall, we took a look at XFX's GeForce 7900 GT XXX Edition video card last month, and I highly recommended it as you simply can't beat it for the money. Today we're finally going to be looking at NVIDIA's GeForce 7900 GTX, but this time it's from BFG.
 BFG GeForce 7900 GTX OC 512MB PCI-E Review
I can't imagine there are many real enthusiasts out there who haven't yet heard of BFG. They're pretty popular amongst gamers and they've got a loyal customer base thanks to their reputation for excellent customer support and for their lifetime warranty. Unlike XFX, BFG only has one model for each of it's cards, and they're all the OC versions. Their approach is basically to offer the best performance they possibly can. No hunting for the right version of the GeForce 7900 GTX from BFG. While BFG's GeForce 7900 GTX OC uses the standard NVIDIA reference cooler, it comes slightly higher clocked.
BFG has increased the clock speeds from 650MHz and 1.6GHz DDR to a moderate 670MHz and 1.64GHz DDR. Not exactly a huge leap, but it's something. Which leaves actually some extra room for overclocking on our part, oin the core and memory. The first thing you'll likely notice when you see the GeForce 7900 GTX is that it's a monster of a card. You can pretty well expect at this point that any top-of-the-line card from NVIDIA or ATI is going to take up two slots with a massive cooler. BFG, like most, decided to stick with the reference cooler and slap on a pretty sticker to call it their own.
NVIDIA and ATI's current generation of cards are neck-and-neck, as is rarely the case. Usually you will see one card beat the other by a noticeable amount and then pricing and availability have been determining factors in the past. What we see this generation are great offerings from both sides which essentially tie in the majority of our benchmarks. In a couple of our games that use OpenGL, we see NVIDIA come out ahead, and then in the X3 Reunion demo we see ATI doing a little better, but those games are the minority where you'll notice a difference in performance.
At the end of the day, I find it very hard to recommend BFG's GeForce 7900 GTX OC 512MB video card. It isn't a bad card, and ATI's Radeon X1900 XTX isn't any better, but given the price to performance ratio, buying one of these ultra high-end cards just isn't logical. Even those of you who don't care about money and just want the fastest thing around shouldn't buy one now that NVIDIA has launched their GeForce 7950 GX2. Not that I'm recommending you get one of those either, but if you want the latest and most powerful card available, that's what you'd be looking at.
After going back and forth, trying to figure out what to say in my conclusion, I finally decided that the best decision you could possibly make if you want a high-end video card is to save yourself a lot of money and get a GeForce 7900 GT. Get the best deal you are able to find on a new GeForce 7900 GT, and you will be very happy with your purchase.
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