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Summer is finally upon us. The sun's out. School's out. And now new video cards are out too -- when has it been a better time to be a gamer?  

If you've been considering a video card upgrade this summer, you might be wondering if July is the time to make your move. The 8600's have been around a couple of months now, and the dust in the middle of the road is starting to settle. Prices are falling, and some serious raw GPU power has never been cheaper.

If you are in the market for a video card upgrade, you might be considering whether it's worth paying the price for a DirectX 10 capable card. If you have been browsing prices online, you'll see that for the money you could drop on a mid-range DirectX 10 card, you can pick up a top-end DirectX 9 card. On the other hand, you want to be prepared for the future of gaming, which will be, like it or not, exclusively DirectX10, and exclusively Vista, one day. But if you decide on going the DirectX 10 route, then you have another problem: it isn't really possibe to gauge how well current DirectX 10 cards will fair down the road, because so few DirectX 10 games been released. 

But for the sake of this article, let's say you've decided to go DirectX 10. Today we will be looking at BFG's latest entry into fray: the 8600 GTS OC2. The 'OC2' means it's overclocked twice. This card should push the current limits of the 8600 series cards -- let's see how it'll do.

But before we get to the details of the BFG 8600 GTS OC2, lets consider where this card sits in relation to the others around it. Up until very recently, there has not been an landslide supply of new-generation, mid-range options. But this is slowly changing. ATI very recently launched their competive mid-range offerings, the HD 2600 PRO/XT line. While these cards didn't knock off any socks with overwhemingly performance, they do appear to be coming to market at less-than-expected prices, and do offer serious competition for the mid-range enthusiast's dollar. So now, all of sudden, we have a much wider selection of mid-range cards: at the lower end, you have inexpensive HD 2600 Pro's/XT's, and at the higher end of the mid-range, you have the more expensive overclocked 8600 GTS's, such as today's BFG 8600 GTS OC2.

The BFG GTS OC2 brings promise of being one of the most powerful 8600 GPU based cards to date. Let's take a closer look at the card, and see what we can see...