Last February, in 2006, the gaming engineers at BFG Technologies released their first 320MB overclocked GeForce 8800 GTS. As a follow-up, the guys at BFG are back, with a revised overclocked edition, the GeForce 8800 GTS OC2 edition. The BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC2, released back in March, has twice the memory of the GeForce 8800 GTS OC, and has had the overclocking raised up a notch. The OC2 edition is a graphics card with some serious firepower. The card is aimed to interest gamers who are willingly to pay for high performance, but are perhaps not wanting to shell out the top dollar for the pricey pinnacle of GPU technology right now, the GeForce 8800 GTX. - NeoSeeker

BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC2 640MB Graphics Review

Being an overclocked GeForce 8800 GTS card with 640MB's of memory, this BFG offering could be seen as addressing a midway point between the attractive price of a 320MB variant GeForce 8800 GTS, and compared to the expensive performance of a GeForce 8800 GTX. You're probably aware of this old gaming adage, the better looking games get, the larger textures grow. To house all those complex textures, you're going to need ever increasing amounts of graphics memory. Bigger is always better, but where is the point of diminishing returns? And, what can 640MB do for you that 320 MB can't?

Like any other GeForce 8800 GTS cards, the BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC2 does not look like it has been changed much from the GTS reference board design. The only feature that distinguishes its appearance from the GeForce 8800 GTS OC is the OC2 sticker on the fan, and the OC label on the cooler. As per the GeForce 8800 reference board design, we have the familar, metal heavy, double width cooler. The cooler has great many aluminum fins, and a single side heat pipe. Previous GeForce 8800 series cards have not been very loud, and this GeForce 8800 GTS OC2 edition is no exception.

What you can't judge from appearance are clock speeds, the engineering team at BFG overclocked the OC2 edition core clock to 580MHz, the memory clock to 1700MHz, and the shader to 1350MHz. For this summer, the BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC2 edition is one of the faster cards you buy. Powering the OC2 edition is NVIDIA's G80 graphics processing unit. While the G80 is also found in the GeForce 8800 GTX, it is somewhat crippled for the GeForce 8800 GTS cards. A crippled G80 is still able to give you twice the pixel and texture fillrate as a GeForce 8600 GTS, and about three times the shader processing power.

Well, in the end, we would be happy to game with a BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC2 card in our case. You get a lot of power and you can expect 640MB of GDDR3 to serve you well into the future, when more texture hungry games are released. To the BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC2's benefit, it is possible that the current crop of games just aren't optimized to use more than 320MB of memory and down the road, the extra 320MB may be very handy indeed. But for now, many of you out there would probably be better served by saving the extra cash, and looking at a GeForce 8800 GTS card with 320MB.