BFG Tech GeForce GTX 260 OCX Maxcore

Overclocking

We overclocked BFG Tech’s GeForce GTX 260 OCX Maxcore graphics card using RivaTuner v2.11 to increase the clock speeds and Crysis to check that the card was stable at the higher speeds. We increased the frequencies by 5MHz at a time, testing for visual corruption and throttling with Crysis under DirectX 10 at each incremental boost.

As a quick reminder, the GTX 260 OCX Maxcore comes clocked at 655MHz core, 1,404MHz shader and 2,250MHz (effective) on the memory.

Following a few hours of fairly laborious overclocking, we finally managed to get the card running stable at 700MHz core, 1,500MHz shader and 2,500MHz (effective) memory, which represents a fairly good increase over Nvidia's reference clock speeds of 576/1,292/1,998MHz.

We saw a performance increase of approximately nine percent over the stock GTX 260 OCX Maxcore in Crysis, which should mean it's faster than a reference GeForce GTX 280. That's a pretty impressive feat and we're sure the awesome 2.5GHz memory clock has a lot to do with the performance increase. We very much believe that the GTX 260 OCX Maxcore is bandwidth limited in some scenarios.

Final Thoughts

It's always hard to judge the value of a card that has just arrived on the market, because retailers usually charge above the odds for whatever's new, which consequently makes the new hardware look like poor value for money. With BFG Tech's GeForce GTX 260 OCX Maxcore, the same is true to some extent – it's currently just over £250, including VAT, which means it's a lot more than the Radeon HD 4870s and 'old' GeForce GTX 260s out there on the market. It's also not much cheaper than a GeForce GTX 280 and in fact, we've managed to find one on special offer for the same price as BFG Tech's new GTX 260 OCX Maxcore.

If you disregard the special offer, we found an Gigabyte GeForce GTX 280 at £275.99 – that's only about £25 more than BFG Tech's new card and it'll not only deliver more performance out of the box, but also have the potential to really push on beyond what the GTX 260 OCX Maxcore can achieve even after overclocking. I think in this case, spending the extra would be well worth your consideration because it's not going to be as bandwidth limited as the new GTX 260 (or should that be GTX 270?) appears to be in some scenarios.

What's more, a standard GeForce GTX 260 is sitting at just £165 now, with the cheapest "available" card sitting at just under £170. Of course, not everybody buys a graphics card on price and wants a decent brand behind it – that's something BFG Tech has going for it and our anonymous experiences with its support infrastructure have been good in the past. If you were looking for a BFG Tech-branded GTX 260, you're looking at around £205 for the cheapest model it offers. The cheapest Maxcore is going to cost you around another £20 more than that, which may not seem like bad value in many respects. However, what we'd really like to see BFG Tech do is lower the price of the GeForce GTX 260 OCX Maxcore by around £15-20 and then it'd be a product that makes a lot of sense when it comes to making a purchasing decision.

I haven't talked much about what competition is on offer from AMD at this price point so far, and that's mainly because there isn't anything at the moment. AMD has talked about releasing a Radeon HD 4850 X2, but so far we haven't seen any evidence from AMD's partners of that happening yet and the product was supposed to follow 'shortly after' the 4870 X2's launch back in the middle of August.

It's unfortunate then that the GTX 260 OCX Maxcore has been priced out of contention, because in actual fact there's not a lot wrong with it. It delivers more performance than the standard GTX 260 and it's not all that far off a GTX 280 in many scenarios. The only situations where it isn't is when you really start to tax that memory bus—either with high resolutions in graphic-intensive games, or with high levels of anti-aliasing—when the new GTX 260 starts to show a bit of a weakness.

The biggest weakness for the new GTX 260 though is its name – if not for the board partners then definitely for the all-important consumer. I hate to have to come back to this, but it wasn't until I started searching around retailers that I realised that BFG Tech currently has no less than seven different GeForce GTX 260 models. That makes for a bit of spaghetti not only for BFG, but also for the consumer – I mean, which GTX 260 should I, the consumer, buy when there are seven to choose from?

This isn't just limited to BFG Tech – it's also the case with just about every Nvidia board partner that's going to introduce the GTX 270 new GTX 260. What this means is that consumers are going to have to be much more educated and vigilant when it comes to choosing what GTX 260 to buy because not only will clock speeds change between boards, but also stream processor counts as well.

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