BFG GeForce 6600 GT OC

BFG is one of the newer entrants in the video card world, but have quickly gained ground on more established manufacturers thanks to their 24/7 free phone/email tech support and their lifetime product warranty, the only lifetime warranty in the business. In more recent months, BFG has also gone out of their way to deliver cards that run at speeds faster than NVIDIA’s specifications call for. The “OC” in the BFG GeForce 6600 GT stands for overclocked. BFG’s entire line of OC cards are overclocked from the factory, resulting in cards that run faster than competing cards from other manufacturers, who typically stick to NVIDIA’s stock clock speeds.

The BFG GeForce 6600 GT OC is clocked to run at 525MHz core/525MHz memory, an improvement of 25MHz (5%) on the graphics core and a whopping 75MHz on the memory (14%). This change nets the BFG card an additional 2.4GB/sec of memory bandwidth (16.8GB/sec in the BFG 6600 GT OC versus 14.4GB/sec in conventional GeForce 6600 GT AGP cards), which will really come into play at high resolutions and/or situations with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering turned on.

The real beauty of this is that BFG doesn’t charge a premium for this added performance: the BFG GeForce 6600 GT OC AGP retails for the same $200 as other GeForce 6600 GT AGP cards on the market. In addition, BFG backs the card up with their full lifetime warranty, making this card perfect for those of you who have always wanted to dabble in overclocking your card, but have ultimately been reluctant to do so because you didn’t want to risk damaging it. BFG’s “OC” line solves this dilemma for you!

Just how is BFG able to guarantee their GeForce 6600 GT OC won’t die a premature death due to the increased heat generated by overclocking? Simple, BFG uses better cooling.

Sitting atop the GeForce 6600 GT’s NV43 graphics core is a large copper heatsink. Copper’s thermal conductivity characteristics are superior to aluminum, allowing the copper heatsink BFG uses to draw more heat off the graphics core than if a similar aluminum-based heatsink design would have been used. BFG then adds rolled copper fins to the recipe for increased surface area. The results speak for themselves: we noted the lowest idle and load temperatures with the BFG card at 37 degrees Celsius and 54 degrees Celsius respectively. Basically, not only does the GeForce 6600 GT OC run faster than competing cards, it also runs cooler. BFG even adds blue LEDs to the card’s fan for added panache.


But the clock speeds weren’t the only aspect of the BFG card that drew our attention. The BFG GeForce 6600 GT OC also sports dual DVI connections. This provides the most flexible combination of display connections available, allowing you to power a pair of DVI-equipped flat panel monitors; or, thanks to the two DVI adapters provided in the BFG card’s packaging, dual VGA displays.

BFG bundles their GeForce 6600 GT OC card with a copy of NVDVD 2.0, Windowblinds (with custom BFG skins for decking out your Windows desktop), an HDTV component video output with built-in S-Video output to your conventional TV, two DVI adapters, and finally, a power adapter. No game bundle is provided with the BFG GeForce 6600 GT OC.