BFG GeForce GTX 260 OCX Maxcore 55

BFG is no stranger to our roundups, as the granddaddy of lifetime warranties and factory-overclocked GeForce cards, BFG has earned a reputation for delivering reliable, high-performing GeForce cards for the last 8 years they’ve been in business. One new feature the company has added recently is their own trade up program, giving BFG customers the ability to trade up to a newer card if they wish. The user merely pays the difference in cost between the original card and the card they wish to upgrade to. What’s the catch? The upgrade must occur within 100 days of the original card purchase, with BFG requiring users to register with bfgtech.com in order to participate.

Like EVGA’s Step Up program, you can only trade up once, so you should use your upgrade wisely when you choose to redeem it.

To appeal to as wide an audience as possible, BFG offers many graphics cards for a given GPU, all at various price points. On the bottom of the spectrum are their OC cards. As you can imagine, the “OC” stands for overclocked, with BFG overclocking the cards from the factory in order to deliver improved performance.

The OC though is fairly tame for BFG standards, and usually isn’t more than 20MHz over the stock NVIDIA reference frequencies for the graphics core memory. For users who would like to step up their game to something more powerful, BFG also offers an “OC2” line of graphics cards. These boards are typically clocked 30MHz+ higher than OC boards, providing a really nice boost in performance but at a slight price premium. For instance, BFG’s GeForce GTX 260 OC2 Maxcore 55 features a 630MHz core clock – 40MHz higher than the OC – and 1350MHz shader clock, an improvement of 54MHz over the OC model.

BFG’s flagship offering for the 55-nm GeForce GTX 260 though is the GeForce GTX 260 OCX Maxcore 55.


The OCX model runs at 655MHz core/1404MHz shaders, while the board’s memory is clocked at 1125MHz (2250MHz effective). This is a substantial improvement over the base GeForce GTX 260’s stock clocks of 576MHz core/1242MHz shaders/999MHz memory. In fact, the OCX clocks are higher than NVIDIA’s reference specifications for the more expensive GeForce GTX 280.

BFG’s OCX actually comes closest to the GeForce GTX 285 in terms of pure clock speeds.

With such high clocks, the card is obviously tailored towards enthusiasts who crave maximum performance, but want the assurance of factory guaranteed speeds and warranty. In this regard, the OCX certainly delivers, as it’s clocked higher than any other card in this roundup.

As you’d expect, this kind of performance does come at a price premium. BFG’s OCX board currently sells for $228.99 on Newegg right now, with a $20 mail-in rebate dropping the after rebate price down to $208.99. This makes it the priciest board in our roundup after rebates kick in.

Bundle and accessories

BFG ships the GeForce GTX 260 OCX Maxcore 55 with one 6-pin PCIe power adapter, a DVI adapter, HDMI adapter, component video cable, and the audio passthrough cable you’ll need to run audio over HDMI. No game bundle is included with the card, just the driver CD you’ll inevitably end up losing at some point.