BFG Tech GeForce 9800 GTX OCX 512MB

Overclocking

We’ve done quite a bit of GeForce 9800 GTX overclocking already, as we had four cards in our hands ahead of the launch – the best overclocker at the time was BFG Tech’s standard-clocked card, with Leadtek’s card not far behind. However, two of the cards we received didn’t manage to hit frequencies anywhere near close to the clock speeds that the BFG Tech GeForce 9800 GTX OCX ships at, so it’ll be interesting to see how well this particular card gets on.

We used a combination of RivaTuner and GPU-Z to verify our clock speed increases and then we used Crysis and Call of Duty 4 to check that the card was stable as frequencies went up. We started by pushing straight up to 799MHz core—the speeds that we hit with BFG Tech’s ‘reference’ card at launch—all was well, so we pushed the frequencies up in 5MHz increments and then once we fell over the cliff of stability, we fine tuned to find the optimal frequencies.

Eventually, we reached 816MHz core, which resulted in a 2.04GHz shader clock – that’s pretty impressive and it’s the first time we’ve gone through the 2,000MHz barrier on the shader clocks. The memory, on the other hand increased up to 2354MHz – just 14MHz higher than the clock speed we reached with BFG Tech’s standard 9800 GTX.

While the frequencies are pretty high—and more importantly are higher than what we achieved with the standard 9800 GTX cards we’ve already overclocked in-house—they percentage increase isn’t quite as impressive as it was with the original cards we looked at. That is, of course, down to the fact that BFG Tech qualifies and provides a warranty for the card to run at much higher frequencies out of the box.

Final Thoughts...

To be fair, I’m still in two minds about the GeForce 9800 GTX. And even though BFG Tech has gone above and beyond the call of duty here, I still don’t think it’s enough for me to change my mind about this particular card in Nvidia’s line-up.

You see, the standard cards are still on the expensive side compared to the GeForce 8800 GTX and GeForce 8800 GTS 512, while BFG Tech’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 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 here today.

When the 3870 X2 drags its feet in games that don’t scale so well, the BFG Tech 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, I think it’s the better purchase right now in the £250 price bracket.

That’s not to say that BFG Tech’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 thanks to the included S/PDIF cable. 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.

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