NVIDIA's GeForce 9800 GTX launched somewhat ironically on April fool's day, the reason for the irony was that we argued it wasn't enough of a jump in performance to be regarded as a replacement for the old dog that is the GeForce 8800 GTX. In isolation, the card wasn't bad, but it wasn't much faster than NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB and it definitely didn't warrant the price premium. Quite simply, the GeForce 8800 GTX has ruled the roost ever since it launched in November 2006, the only single GPU card that has come along and bested it is essentially an overclocked GeForce 8800 GTX. That's the luxury one affords when it sits at the top of the chain virtually unchallenged. - Bit-Tech

BFG GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB OCX Edition Review

AMD combined a pair of RV670 GPU's together to create its closest GeForce 8800 GTX competitor to date, the Radeon HD 3870 X2. However, while there are many titles where the latter simply out classes the former, there are titles where the opposite is true. It's almost a question of which games you play and whether there is any benefit to AMD's dual-GPU behemoth. And sadly for AMD though, almost as soon as AMD launched that card, NVIDIA rolled out the GeForce 9800 GX2, combining a pair of G92 GPU's to deliver performance above and beyond what the G80 based graphics cards could ever achieve during games.

But, it's not all plain sailing for the GeForce 9800 GX2 because it has all of the drawbacks of SLI and in our opinion there is no benefit to having all of those drawbacks in a single PCI Express slot. Anyway, before we get too sidetracked with where the graphics card market is moving, we should get onto what we're here to look at today the BFG GeForce 9800 GTX OCX graphics card. When the GeForce 9800 GTX launched, NVIDIA limited partners to only releasing cards clocked at NVIDIA's predefined reference clock speeds and BFG followed suit but then shortly came out with various overclocked versions.

The OCX branding is new with the GeForce 9800 GTX as BFG believes that it can push this particular card even higher than it feels is suitable for the OC2 speed grade. On top of the core speed increase, BFG has also pushed the shader clock up to a healthy 1890MHz. And encouragingly, BFG hasn't left the memory at its standard clock speed like it does on some of its cards instead, the company has slapped another 100MHz on top of the reference 2200MHz for good measure. To be fair, we are still in two minds about the GeForce 9800 GTX. And even though BFG has gone above and beyond the call of duty here.

You see, the standard cards are still on the expensive side compared to the GeForce 8800 GTX and GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB, while BFG's GeForce 9800 GTX OCX is priced at such a point that it's no longer competing against only products in NVIDIA's line-up, but also against the Radeon HD 3870 X2. And over time, it seems like the Radeon HD 3870 X2's drivers have improved a bit and it's now becoming a more rounded purchase when you compare it to something like the card we've looked at today. Don't get us wrong also NVIDIA is working on their drivers though ATI generally gains more performance increase.

When the Radeon HD 3870 X2 drags its feet in games that don't scale so well, the BFG GeForce 9800 GTX OCX is a faster card, but when you get into scenarios where scaling is there, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 is generally a significantly faster proposition. And because of that, we think it's the better purchase right now in the $350 price bracket. That's not to say that BFG's card is one that you shouldn't consider at all, the company has worked to correct the omissions from its earlier bundles and you can now use the audio over HDMI functionality which is certainly something that many users are looking for.

It's also one of the highest clocked GeForce 9800 GTX cards out there and it's backed by an impressive warranty term which makes it one of the best G92 based cards on the market today. It's also the first G92 based card we've seen that bests the GeForce 8800 GTX in a convincing enough manner for it to be considered a replacement.