BFG GTX 280 OCX 1GB Video Card Review

Temperature Testing

This one had us scratching our heads a bit since in theory an overclocked core should produce a fair bit more heat than a non-overclocked one. Right? Well, this card bucked the trend and after retesting the stock GTX 280, we found out exactly why. It seems that BFG has used a completely different fan speed profile than was present on the reference card which has a twofold benefit. Not only does it stop the temperature from reaching as high as it did on the reference card and since it is brought under control a lot sooner, the fan doesn’t have to work nearly as hard. This results in a small acoustical foot print as well. Overall, we were quite happy with this result since BFG seems to have got the rampant temperatures of the GT200 core well under control.

Acoustical Properties

As we already mentioned in the Temperature Testing section, BFG was able to make sure the fan spun up earlier than the reference design. This means that the acoustical footprint of the OCX is much smaller than that of the stock card since as the temperature rises, the fan doesn’t have to work as hard to bring things under control. While a fan speed profile like this means that there will be slightly higher noise in low load conditions, this benefits the user in the long run.

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.

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.


Naturally, an overclocked card will take quite a bit more power than the stock card and we see this here in both the idle and the load values. It is simply mind boggling how much the GTX 280 cards consume when under high load but we really have to say that idle power consumption is extremely good. Unlike the ATI cards, Nvidia has the dynamic clock and voltage settings humming along quite nicely but please make sure you get a suitably high-end power supply if you are running one of these cards. For the BFG GTX 280 OCX we would recommend that you use a quality 700W power supply since the values you see here show very little load on the rest of the system.