BFG GTX 285 OCX 1GB Video Card Review

Conclusion

So there you have it; another successful launch from Nvidia has come and gone with board partners like BFG releasing highly overclocked models of an already-powerful card. Make no mistake about it; BFG has come to the table with all guns blazing when it comes to the performance of their OCX model. Price aside, this GTX 285 is currently the top dog when it comes to single GPU out-of-box performance which is saying a lot considering the competition it is up against. This is illustrated extremely well when you compare its performance to even the HD 4870 X2 and GTX 295 in some applications that hold back the dual chippery found on the highest-end video cards.

There are however some worms of apprehension making their way through my mind so please read through this before I have to get my flame suit on. I really have to appreciate BFG’s candor and honesty when it came to admitting that they set their sights too high with an original 712Mhz core clock on this card and felt better about releasing an OCX version clocked at 702Mhz instead. What bothers me a bit is that this in turn makes this card’s clock speeds a near match to those found on the EVGA SSC Edition with the only difference being a miniscule difference in memory speeds. Remember, this is supposed to be BFG’s flagship GTX 285 but the competition over at EVGA has not yet released their flagship FTW Edition which is sure to carry a clock speed significantly higher than 702Mhz if it is ever released.

The clock speeds on the OCX point us towards the next interesting tidbit concerning the GTX 285: it seems that overclocking on the 55nm cores is somewhat limited to around 730Mhz which runs contrary to what we saw with the GTX SSC Edition. The OCX on the other hand was able to attain almost no additional overclocking on the core but the memory was more than willing to rock and roll. Indeed, the memory on these GTX 285 cards seems to have an ungodly willingness to overclock to the 3Ghz mark which until very recently was considered well beyond the means of air-cooled GDDR3 memory.

What really amazes us about these new GTX 285 cards is how efficient they are when it comes to power consumption. At idle the BFG GTX OCX puttered merrily along consuming less than 150W which is perfect for those of you who pull double duty of word processing and gaming with your computers. Add to that the extremely quiet operation of the fan and you have a card that can be as mild mannered as a sleeping baby while retaining the fangs of a true performance beast.

Indeed, there really isn’t much to distinguish this card from EVGA’s SSC model other than the fact that the OCX seems to have little to no availability here in Canada. That doesn’t stop this card from having its own allure and a lot of that appeal comes from the fact that I won’t have to RMA my card over an international border anymore since BFG has a Canadian-based RMA facility. This attention to what may amount to a small portion of their market should win them accolades from all of us Canadians.

Since we can’t consider the inexact science of overclocking into the way we look at this card, BFG’s attention to excellent customer service coupled with the truly high-performance graphics card the have produced with the GTX 285 OCX means this card wins our Dam Good Award.


Pros:

- Extremely good performance
- Efficient
- Relatively small acoustical footprint
- Lifetime Warranty
- Canadian RMA facility

Cons:

- Availability
- Price