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Introduction

One of our laments several months ago was how all the midrange cards from both NVIDIA and ATI were coming out not for the upgrade hungry AGP market, but for PCI Express. Users with 5700s, 5900s or 9600s did not have much in terms of an upgrade path to the current generation midrange parts on either the NVIDIA or ATI side. There were some nice stop gap solutions like the 9800 Pro, but as far as the 6600GTs, and X700s were concerned, they were not available at all for AGP until recently. This changed however in the middle of November - NVIDIA announced the availability of 6600GT AGP parts, the first midrange next generation part to make it to AGP. NVIDIA was able to beat its rival to the market thanks to the magic of their HSI bridge chip which translates PCI Express protocols to AGP and vice versa. This allows NVIDIA to have a single chip for both PCI Express and AGP parts and avoid a costly revamp of the chip both in terms of time and manufacturing costs of having to manage two separate chip lineups for essentially the same product.

One of the companies that is synonymous with NVIDIA is BFG Technologies. BFG has always been a NVIDIA only card producer and their enthusiast oriented products, lifetime warranty, and 24/7 toll free telephone tech support are hallmarks of BFG as a company. These qualities have struck a chord with the hardware community as BFG is arguably one of the first names that come to mind when looking for NVIDIA based video cards.

Today we take at BFG's 6600GT OC AGP, a part that gamers still on last generation's midrange cards should take a very close look at especially if PCIe is not in the works for the near future. BFG's OC series has been very popular amongst gamers as it features an out of box factory guaranteed overclocked and a lifetime warranty.

Here's a handy chart to compare the specs of some of the different NVIDIA cards -

We see a modest 5% overclock on the GPU core and a pretty large 17% increase on the memory. Note that the raw theorectical memory bandwidth does not take into account any sort of compression and optimizations present in the GeForce 6 family so the numbers between the NV3x and NV3x families are not directly comparable.