No sooner had we finished our in-depth game benchmarking of this summer's latest graphics cards and architectures, then the first pre-overclocked partner cards began to arrive. Claiming performance increases of up to twelve percent, we decided to put these warranty covered overclocks to the test, and see just how much extra performance you get by paying extra for that bit more juice. While we might have bestowed the ATI Radeon HD 4870 card with a coveted excellence award, what is not so excellent is the degree of control that AMD is exerting over its partners, slowing the release of pre-overclocked versions, which are still a ways off from reaching customers. - Bit-Tech

BFG GeForce GTX 280 OCX Graphics Version Review

Be assured once pre-overclocked versions of these cards do reach retailers, we will be doing a comparison ATI overclocked roundup too. In contrast, NVIDIA has seemingly given its board partners full reign over what speeds they ship GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280 graphics cards at, although they are as usual limited by NVIDIA's reference design coolers. This has meant that heavily overclocked versions of these cards are on sale within weeks of the product launch, and from what we can ascertain, availability is fair throughout the GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280 range, although this has more to do with pricing somehow.

As usual from BFG, there are no included games or software, but it's certainly spared no expense with the included hardware provided with the GeForce GTX 280 OCX version, packing a six foot gold plated HDMI cable and DVI to HDMI adapter to ensure the easiest connectivity to high definition TV screens. These rare inclusions are joined by the now standard dual PCI Express 6-pin to 8-pin and dual molex to 6-pin connectors. The card is basically the same as the reference design, with BFG stickers on it to identify the board partner. To follow the usual trend from BFG there's what can only be described as a voodoo guy.

However, while the design might be the same, the default clocks most certainly are not, with this particular model running with the standard 1GB of GDDR3 memory running at 2400MHz effective compared to 2214MHz on the reference design. The core and shader clocks have also been increased significantly, from to 602MHz to 665MHz and from 1298MHz to 1458MHz speeds respectively. This represents around a ten percent increase in pure clock speeds, and whether it translates to a similar ten percent increase in performance will have to wait until we throw some gaming benchmarks at the graphics card shortly.

We've certainly seen that these overclocked cards can offer some quite impressive improvements in performance over their stock clocked competitors in most games, resolutions and anti-aliasing settings. The overclocks translated almost directly into performance increases in some games, especially the GPU heavy Crysis. Whilst a stock GeForce GTX 280 is an understandable single card extravagance, paying so much more for only a few extra frames per second seems incredibly hard to swallow. We suppose if money is no object and you're chasing 3DMarks, wanting a card guaranteed to do well it's a no brainer option.

While it undoubtedly improves on the GeForce GTX 280's already phenomenal performance, we're not sure the performance boost is worth the significant extra investment. A stock GeForce GTX 280 can produce playable frame rates on any modern game at even the highest resolutions, so despite the performance improvements, the high price is hard to stomach. However if your gaming room is measured in acres and your budget is measured in dollars, what the OCX version offers is the best possibly performance BFG can muster for you, and you will probably watercool it to try for more anyway.

The problem is that this card is presently is rarer than rocking horse poop in the UK, while the slightly lower clocked BFG GeForce GTX 280 OC edition is much easier to get hold of, and $50 cheaper at $549, it's also not much faster than stock clocked cards either. Out of the two GeForce GTX 280's though this is the card we would get, it has a better package and better warranty, even if it is a bit more money.