Just a few short weeks ago, NVIDIA launched their GeForce GTX 285 and while it's the fastest single GPU based graphics card we've ever tested, we felt that it was priced in a rather awkward manner. NVIDIA set its price point at not that much less than their flagship GeForce GTX 295, which means there isn't that much wiggle room for its partners. Nevertheless, board partners whose bread and butter is delivering factory overclocked parts have taken the GeForce GTX 285 cards with open arms. The BFG GeForce GTX 285 OCX is the US based board partner's flagship and it comes with some fairly impressive frequency increases as you'd normally expect from a card carrying the OCX label. - Bit-Tech

BFG GeForce GTX 285 OCX 1GB Card Edition Review

The stream processor clock has been boosted by over 100MHz and represents a seven percent increase in shader throughput. The memory has also had a seven percent clock speed increase as well and while that doesn't sound impressive, when you consider the raw frequencies it really is. The memory on this board is humming along at over 2660MHz effective speeds, which equates to more than 170GB/sec of memory bandwidth combined with the GeForce GTX 285's 512-bit memory bus. As for the card itself, it is understandably a reference design card with a sticker on the heatsink shroud, though cooling is quite effective and quiet.

Since BFG has already clocked the pants off this board, which was originally supposed to be clocked at 712MHz and then later lowered down to just 702MHz following some yield issues at the higher clocks, we weren't expecting a great deal when it came to overclocking. What's more, the GDDR3 memory is running at the highest speed we've seen to date for this memory type and we were unsure whether there'd be any additional headroom. Our concerns were quickly washed away as soon as we started overclocking though, as we did manage to squeeze some additional performance out of the graphics card.

The GPU core and shader speeds were unlinked and we managed to increase these to 730MHz and 1698MHz respectively. The memory increase was the one that impressed us the most, we pushed it all the way to 2795MHz before we ran into the stability wall. As such BFG has introduced some excellent clock speed enhancements on its GeForce GTX 285 OCX graphics card and in just some scenarios they do genuinely make a difference which can't be said for a lot of pre-overclocked graphics cards these days, but it is at least true to some extent. Though BFG did each time raise the bar and done that with great results.

These improvements come at a price though and it's not one we find easy to swallow. At around $499 it's not an affordable board for most people and it's not that much cheaper than a GeForce GTX 295 or a Radeon HD 4870 X2 for that matter. If you've got your heart set on spending almost $550 on a BFG GeForce GTX 285 OCX graphics card, we'd say it's well worth spending the $599 or so required to get BFG's GeForce GTX 295 video card. It's faster and although it's more expensive, it actually looks like much better value. What's more, it's also the fastest graphics card on the planet at the moment.

BFG has ticked most of the boxes on our checklist with its GeForce GTX 285 OCX graphics card, its clock speed increases are impressive, and there's still headroom for overclocking, performance is excellent, the after sales service has a proven track record and it's the fastest single GPU graphics card we've ever tested. But all of this comes at a price and sadly that cost is just too much when you look at the wider market. There are still a bunch of bargain GeForce GTX 280's on the market and if we were you, we would snap one of those up while you can. These are still excellent performers as well as great overclockers.

The market has shifted and NVIDIA needs to lower the prices of its GeForce GTX 285 GPU's so that partners can compete with the competition that's out there from AMD. Now at the moment, most of the GeForce GTX 285's are competing against the Radeon HD 4870 X2 and we think we all know who wins that battle.