Just two weeks ago, NVIDIA launched the GeForce 8800 GT and we found that it was the best bang for the buck graphics card currently available, and probably one of the best value graphics cards ever released. There's oodles of performance on tap at a price point that is affordable for many and it really drove great DirectX 10 performance down to a mainstream price point. Something we've said quite a bit these past few weeks is how great this year's line up of PC games is, it's as if PC gaming hasn't been in a better state than it is now. New games titles should be getting released later this week, with Crysis being one of the games that will be getting a lot of attention as well as Unreal Tournament 3. - Bit-Tech

BFG GeForce 8800 GT OC PCI Express Board Review

The GeForce 8800 GT's launch really pushed the fact that PC gaming is in great shape right smack bang in front of us and there's more to follow in the very near future too, as AMD is set to shake up its own graphics card range up. Since the last BFG card we checked, the company has changed its box design. It almost seems apt to say again, as the company redesigned some of its boxes back when the GeForce 8800 series launched in November last year, however this change appears to be for the good. Let's hope it doesn't change again in the near future, as we quite like this one.

Being a very early GeForce 8800 GT, BFG's OC edition card looks just like the NVIDIA reference card. In fact, if it wasn't for some well placed stickers, you'd be mistaken for it being a reference card. The differences are under the hood though, as they say. The cooler is exactly the same and BFG appears to be using the default fan settings. Under the black metal shroud, there is an array of aluminium fins connected via a heatpipe to a copper block that comes into direct contact with the GPU core. Based on what other heatsink manufacturers are doing these days, this seems to be the optimal way for a heatsink with fan combination.

The GeForce 8800 GT is based on NVIDIA's G92 graphics processing unit, which is a 754 million transistor behemoth fabbed on 65nm process. There are 112 scalar stream processors which, in the case of the BFG card run at 1566MHz. These are arranged in seven clusters of 16 shaders, which each share eight texture address units, eight texture filtering units and have their own independent L1 cache. While the shaders run at 1566MHz, the texture units only run at 625MHz, the clock that is defined as the core clock. This bares resemblance to the G84 and G86, but obviously G92 is a much more complex chip.

We still continue to be impressed by NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GT and in the grand scheme of things, and BFG's overclocked card continues that trend. Admittedly, the BFG GeForce 8800 GT OC is only a few frames per second faster than the reference card in most scenarios, but the benefit of the BFG card is that it comes with a decent warranty and, from experience, good customer services too. At around $315 with free delivery, it's not the cheapest GeForce 8800 GT available, but it's well placed in the middle of the pricing matrix. Of course a standard version will be cheaper, and overclocking can be done yourself.

On the whole, BFG's GeForce 8800 GT OC card delivers and it earns a recommendation from us, but we'd like pricing to settle down to more respectable levels. At the very least, we'd like the prices to come down to the levels we were told the GeForce 8800 GT was expected to hit in the run-up to its launch back on the 29th October. We guess we're not going to see prices settle down until the demand starts to drop off a little, so it's a case of either get one when you can, or wait a while until the demand shrinks. Supply is very short at the moment, as everywhere we've looked, all GeForce 8800 GT's are on backorder.