Many of companies in the NVIDIA graphics card arena compete fiercely with each other, and this is why we see pre-overclocked products these days. Therefore BFG decided to launch their OC2 version of the GeForce 8600 GTS. A highly pimped, overclocked and custom cooled graphics card. Equipped with great warranty and several flavors of a good number of products they recently unleashed the BFG GeForce 8600 GTS OC2 edition. And yes indeed, there is a regular GeForce 8600 GTS version as well. Globally there are merely a couple of players in the NVIDIA graphics arena who can pull off some big products, BFG is such a company. - Guru3D

BFG GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB OC2 Graphics Review

Today we'll be looking at a pre-overclocked OC2 version of the GeForce 8600 GTS. Equipped with 256MB MB memory, a faster running core which is chilled by a new cooler branded Thermo Intelligence. It's not a bad piece of hardware as we'll show you. BFG is dealing with a lot of competition these days and since all competitors offer faster pre-clocked versions they introduced their OC product. You simply take a reference based card, clock it 15MHz faster and call it overclocked. Recently however their quality analysis process has been improved somewhat they are now making a rigid selection of cards.

The top of the cream batch card can be clocked even higher and this get that OC2 label slapped on them. The OC2 version runs at 720/2220MHz with a shader clock of 1566MHz. Anyway, BFG slapped on a new Thermo Intelligence fansink which according to BFG was designed from the ground up by BFG to provide better cooling performance without any gimmicks or draw backs. Some basic distinction that went into the design consisted of moving the fan to the opposite end of the heatsink to eliminate a dead air zone and increasing the surface area over the GPU for better heat dissipation.

As most of you with most video cards know, you can apply a simple series of tricks to boost the overall performance a little. You can do this at two levels, namely tweaking by enabling registry or BIOS hacks, or very simple, tamper with image quality. And then there is overclocking, which will give you the best possible results by far. And that is exactly what we did, overclocking the OC2 edition beyond the already pre-overclocked settings. Doing so we reached nice overclocking of 745/2328MHz. Always bare in mind that our results are an indication and most definitely not a guarantee.

The new cooler which falls under the Thermo Intelligent label really is lovely. Despite the nice overclock temperatures it did remain extremely acceptable while keeping the noise levels at an all-time low. It's a really lovely concept and I can only applaud manufacturers to do customization like this as this market really needs differentiation. It'll boost the overall gaming frame rate slightly better. Last but not least, absolutely lovely is the life-time warranty. All in all that's a lot of additional value, and definitely something you need to keep in mind when you are out there in the market for purchasing a new graphics card.