BFG GTX 285 OCX 1GB Video Card Review

Heat and Acoustics

Heat output from the BFG GTX 285 OCX is pretty much identical to that of the EVGA GTX 285 SSC which isn’t surprising in the least considering both cards share the exact same core speed. All in all this means the overall temperature of the OCX is extremely good for an overclocked card and this goes to show one of the major strengths of the new 55nm core.

As for acoustics, the fan speed profile BFG chose for their card is identical to that of the EVGA SSC. That means this BFG card is quiet as a mouse when at idle but its fan does tend to pick up speed when the going gets tough in high usage situations. Don’t get us wrong and assume this card gets loud when pressed; rather it is the exact opposite since there is almost no way you will hear it if you game at a moderate sound volume. Considering the dust-buster sound most high-end cards are making these days, this comes as a welcome change.

Power Consumption

For this test we hooked up our power supply to a UPM power meter that will log the power consumption of the whole system twice every second. In order to stress the GPU as much as possible we once again use the Batch Render test in 3DMark06 and let it run for 30 minutes to determine the peak power consumption while letting the card sit at a stable Windows desktop for 30 minutes to determine the peak idle power consumption. We have also included several other tests as well.

Please note that after extensive testing, we have found that simply plugging in a power meter to a wall outlet or UPS will NOT give you accurate power consumption numbers due to slight changes in the input voltage. Thus we use a Tripp-Lite 1800W line conditioner between the 120V outlet and the power meter.


And there you have it folks, another near-identical result for the EVGA and BFG cards. It seems that the very slight advantage the BFG card has in memory clocks doesn’t translate into any real-world power consumption increases since its 1W difference is well within the margin of error. All in all, this is actually an excellent result particularly in the case of idle power consumption where Nvidia seems to be leaps and bounds ahead of ATI.