GeForce 7900 GTX Roundup

BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC:

Core Clock: 670MHz
Memory Clock: 1640MHz

BFG Tech's GeForce 7900 GTX OC cards come in a slightly different box to what we'd consider their standard box design, but we feel that it's a generally good one. The cards are packed well inside a padded anti-static bag underneath the bundle contents, which we'll look at in due course. BFG's cards are the only ones that we have here that are clocked above NVIDIA's reference clock speeds. They've modestly increased both the core and memory clocks by 20MHz and 40MHz (effective) respectively - this should provide a slight performance increase.

At this early stage, the card doesn't differ a great deal from the reference card, but BFG Tech have taken the time to design a rather cool-looking design for the heatsink shroud. We've been told that BFG Tech will be rolling out their own design that differs slightly from the reference card when they begin to ramp up production on their own PCBs.

The heatsink is the same as the cooler that was on the GeForce 7800 GTX 512, and also Leadtek's PX7800GTX TDH Extreme. It's a large 80mm fan that spins pretty damn slowly - we couldn't hear the cooler above rather good reference Athlon 64 FX-60 heatsink fan combination in our silent-running ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard. It does a good job of keeping the GPU cool too, as we didn't experience the fan spinning up during heavy gaming.

Due to the size of the cooler, the card takes up two slots on the motherboard. The backplate is a dual slot design, enabling hot air from the card to be exhausted out the back of the case. connectivity wise, the backplate comes with two dual link DVI ports capable of driving two 2560x1600 monitors and a new 7-pin HDTV out port.

The bundle is a pretty comprehensive one, despite there being no games included in it. BFG Tech has included a T-Shirt, some Teflon Slick Pads to reduce the friction created by the bottom of your mouse, some stickers, and two case badges, a driver disk and a copy of Game Drive 9.0 - a utility that enables you to run games without having the CD in your optical drive.

BFG Tech also include a breakout box with connections for YPbPr component out, composite out and S-Video out. They've also included a 6-pin PCI-Express power adapter and two DVI-to-VGA convertors for those of us that are still using analogue displays.

In terms of documentation, there is an installation guide, some marketing leaflets and details of how to make use of BFG Tech's lifetime warranty. It's worth keeping hold of the warranty details, because we've experienced the service first hand. We remained anonymous throughout the entire process and found that our problematic card was replaced in an efficient manner. The only downside was the fact that BFG Tech's support centre is in the USA and our replacement card arrived about two weeks after we sent the faulty card back to them.