It was no joke when NVIDIA launched their GeForce 9800 GTX on April the 1st, and they did so with success. While nothing rather new from a technological or performance point of view, we did notice two very important facts with the release. The first is a reasonably priced strategy for a product performing as well as a GeForce 8800 GTX, the second a pretty hefty overclocking headroom. That last factor, ever since the last couple of years, has been a growing market for manufacturers and board partners like BFG. They offer you a pretty extensive line of products with several gradations on the product clock speed. You know their OC versions, yet recently an OCX version was introduced as well. - Guru3D

BFG GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB OCX Graphics Review

We are assuming that the X in OCX means serious business and equals eXtreme. Pretty much, BFG took the reference GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB and made sure the card you are purchasing will function at a pretty hefty default overclock, while maintaining your warranty. Since BFG offer a lifetime warranty in the US and 10 years in the rest of the world that is just a tremendous combo. The GeForce 9800 GTX is based on the same microprocessor as the GeForce 9800 GX2 and for that matter the same as GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB. They're all products developed with a chip called G92, coming with minor optimizations.

The G92 silicon is based on NVIDIA's newer 65nm silicon. It is a respin chip based on last years architecture from the GeForce 8800 series. See while this GPU architecture is pretty much the same as the good old G80 core there are some very distinct differences. In summary, the new features of G92 opposed to the G80 are smaller 65nm fabrication process, silicon optimizations, usage of 256-bit memory and compared to the already older GTS models a higher shader processor count at 128 sub-cores. The GeForce 9 series cards are HybridPower ready, meaning on future hybrid mainboards this card can deactivate itself.

One more advantage for the GeForce 9800 GTX card is that you can go 3-Way SLI with it. And that might be a sweet spot if the prices come down a little. We like these completely black box, mysterious designs. The GeForce 9800 GTX has integrated HDMI support. And yes, all GeForce 9800 GTX graphics cards provide dual link HDCP support. The cooler has a very slick design though a tad more noisy then what we are used to. Lengthy is what this card surely is, just as long as the GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra. And yes, you'll need two 6-pin power connectors, mainly for overclocking to be honest.

Sure you can purchase a GeForce 9800 GTX graphics card and with a bit of luck clock it towards the same level as tested today. But the OCX model ensures you two things, the first is that the card is pre-tested for you. It is qualified to run at the advertised speeds. The second big plus if that you keep the warranty on the card with the pre-defined overclock, and these two fact together make it a golden combo. It doesn't mean that the standard overclock will bring you a heap of additional performance though, but at average we would say a good ten percent performance increase is plausible and certainly quite common.

With the card also comes Hybrid SLI functionality, with the to be released hybrid mainboards the GeForce 9800 GTX can be switched off when not used. So yeah, we like it. The OCX model in combo with the really good warranty and new step-up program make it a hell of a nice purchase. This is an awesome video card to play games with.