BFG GTX 285 OCX 1GB Video Card Review

The Current Nvidia Lineup

So this is what Nvidia now has for us and it is still not the whole lineup as the lower-end cards such as the 9800 GT are missing. You would be forgiven if you think that the current high end offerings are starting to look every bit as confusing as the 9-series since that is indeed what is happening these days. This is the direct result of increased market pressure from ATI and Nvidia thus having to go into reactionary mode by releasing intermediary GPUs which weren’t forecasted.

See something interesting about all of this? It seems like Nvidia is finally transitioning their lineup to the 55nm manufacturing process but we wish this trend would make its way down into the lower-end parts as well.
Starting at the top of the lineup, we have the heavyweight champion GTX 295 which is slated to be in the top spot for the short-term at least and depending how things go, may stick around pretty far into the future as well. It sports a pair of 55nm cores with specs somewhere between a GTX 280 and GTX 265.


A little bit further down the chart is the GTX 285 which is the next evolutionary step of the GTX 280 as it transitions to 55nm. This is essentially the same card as the “older” GTX 280 but with slightly increased core and SP clocks in order to give it a boost in performance. What is interesting is the fact that Nvidia is claiming that through R&D they were able to refine the silicon on this chip to allow it to perform some10% faster than the GTX 280 through its high clocks while actually consuming 20W less power.

We are going to skip over the GTX 280 for the time being since even though it is still on the market (albeit at a deeply discounted price); it will soon be phased out entirely. The GTX 260 with 216 SPs is next up on the list and we have seen some 55nm cores filter their way down into this card’s SKUs as well. This particular card was made for one purpose only: to compete and beat the HD 4870 512MB and 1GB cards and it does quite well at that. Unfortunately, its introduction also left the standard GTX 260 with nowhere to go other than the EOL pile.

Finally there is the 9800 GTX+ 512MB and newer 1GB cards that have the unenviable job of competing with the HD 4850 but make their presence felt by usually putting up very strong numbers. The “+” version of the 9800 GTX was released shortly after the HD 4850 started mopping the floor with the non-plus version of the GTX and basically used increased clock speeds to increase performance. Indeed, this was the first card in the Nvidia lineup to carry a 55nm core.

This pretty much rounds out the upper end of the Nvidia lineup and luckily, things seem to be clearing up a fair bit when compared to the mess we saw just a few short months ago. As the 65nm cards are discontinued, we will eventually see a purely 55nm lineup from Nvidia which is definitely a welcome sight.

BFG GTX 285 OCX Specs

When we first received the BFG GTX 285 OCX, its specs were listed with a core speed of 712Mhz while its shaders operated at 1620Mhz. This would have put easily above the performance of the EVGA SSC version but unfortunately, that was not meant to be. The initial samples went out with a high clock speed but after continued testing on retail cards, BFG determined that the 712Mhz core clock speed gave them yields which were too low and thus backed off a bit on the speed. For this review we flashed the card with a retail BIOS to give us the clock speeds you see above.