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Overclocking

Just because we have a factory overclocked card does not mean that we will not push it any further and the BFG 6600GT OC was up to the task. We were able to squeeze 588 Mhz out of the GPU and 1.17 Ghz out of the memory before it cried for mercy and the NVIDIA driver control panel shooed us off. The 6600GT OC remained stable through hours of 3DMark05 and displayed no visual anomalies or any other sort of stability in DOOM 3.

You're my boy Blue

Conclusions

The 6600GT is a great upgrade for anyone using last year's midrange card. It will give a very healthy boost to those who are on a 5700, 5900 or a 9600XT and it will still be a nice (albeit smaller) speed boost over the 9800 Pro / XT for the most part. There are a couple instances where the extra memory of the 9800 XT give it an advantage over all the cards in the GeForce 6 family that only utilizes 128MB of memory but in many of the cases it is a moot point as framerates are fairly poor across the board.

While the 6600GT is a great upgrade, the 6600GT OC is an even better one. The extra memory bandwidth in particular allowed BFG's card to stay a step ahead of the reference 6600GT and just behind the 6800. In a couple cases, the 6600GT OC managed to pull ahead of the 6800. It seems like NVIDIA might have done this on purpose as the 6600GT OC gets uncomfortably close to the 6800 and it might be harder for the end user to justify the extra few dollars for the 6800.

Along with some good overclocking results, BFG also throws in their lifetime warranty and 24/7 toll free tech support with the 6600GT OC but unfortunately there is no bundled game included. Pricing is on the higher side - both locally and online, the BFG 6600GT OC commands a premium over other 6600GT AGP cards and like the benchmarks, puts it in the region between reference 6600GT cards and the more expensive 6800. I'm guessing that prices will drop a bit as more cards make it onto the market and the higher price reflects the outstanding warranty and tech support that other companies do not offer. Still, the BFG 6600GT does get awful close to the pricing of the GeForce 6800 but for those that want a no frills, faster than stock card with arguably the best support in the industry it is hard to look beyond BFG's 6600GT OC.