Overclocking:

After a few hours of tweaking and testing, we managed to get BFGTech's GeForce 8600 GTS OC2 ThermoIntelligence running stable at 770MHz core, 1674MHz on the shader clock and 1189MHz (2378MHz effective) on the memory. At higher GPU clocks, the card artifacted pretty heavily, making even the Windows Vista desktop unusable. At higher memory clocks, we suffered from a lot of tearing in all of the games we tested.

These clock speed increases are impressive and much better than what we achieved when we first overclocked the GeForce 8600 GTS in April. The clock speed increases gave us some further incremental performance improvements in Company of Heroes at 1280x1024 0xAA 16xAF under DirectX 10 mode, where we recorded an average frame rate of 25.5 fps and a minimum of 13 fps.

Temperature Testing...

In addition to our usual gamut of testing, we also felt it was right to put some of BFGTech's claims to the test - after all, BFG says that the cooler is five degrees cooler than Nvidia's reference design cooling solution in a single card configuration. In order to do this, we used the same card for our tests, changing the heatsink after we had recorded both load and idle temperatures, which was done at the card's default clock speeds using RivaTuner.

We repeated this three times and tested in an ambient temperature of 23°C.


At idle, the ThermoIntelligence cooler was five degrees cooler than Nvidia's reference design, as claimed by BFGTech, but the company's numbers were obviously taken under load. When we loaded the GPU, we found that the ThermoIntelligence cooler was nine degrees cooler, which is appreciably better than BFG's own claims.

Final Thoughts...

BFGTech's GeForce 8600 GTS OC ThermoIntelligence is a great example of a GeForce 8600 GTS and it delivers good performance for a gamer running a 17” or 19” LCD monitor in current titles. In isolation, it’s a good card with a cooler that does exactly what it the manufacturer claims it will do, and then some based on our results.

Unfortunately though, BFGTech’s ThermoIntelligence cards come with a price premium and the 8600 GTS OC2 is no exception to this rule at over £145 (inc. VAT). You can pick up a stock clocked GeForce 8600 GTS for around £110 (inc. VAT), which isn’t too far behind in the performance stakes.

Probably more of a concern is the fact that Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB starts at just over £180 (inc. VAT), with BFGTech’s own “OC” model starting at around £186. From the results obtained during this evaluation, both of these options look to be significantly better value for money for not that much more.

One thing we've not mentioned is the previous generation mid-range cards that are often perform better than the new generation of mid-range hardware and are available at more attractive price points. Of course, you won't be able to enable DX10 features on these cards, which we've proven can be enabled on the new mid-range cards in native DX10 games like BioShock, but the benefits at the moment are small.

Taking all of this into account, if you are looking for a graphics card that delivers on just the performance front, the BFGTech GeForce 8600 GTS OC2 ThermoIntelligence isn’t for you. However, for those that do care about keeping their graphics card as cool as possible, BFGTech's new line of ThermoIntelligence graphics cards do have their appeal.

Ultimately, you have to ask yourself which is the most important – out and out performance or a combination of performance and cooling technology. For those that see value in a better cooling solution, the BFGTech GeForce 8600 GTS OC2 ThermoIntelligence delivers, but for anyone looking for a graphics card with performance in mind, the underlying technology just isn’t as good as it should be.

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