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Last February, in 2006, the gaming-engineers at BFG Technologies released their first 320 MB overclocked 8800 GTS. As a follow-up, the guys at BFG are back, with a revised overclocked edition: the 8800 GTS OC2. While we reviewed this card's performance in our HD 2900 XT review, we did not get a chance to properly investigate the 640 MB variant of the 8800 GTS -- so this week, we decided to take the card off the shelf, and put it under the microscope.

The BFG 8800 GTS OC2, released back in March, has twice the memory of the 8800 GTS OC, and has had the overclocking raised up a notch. Today we'll see what this card can do.

The BFG 8800 GTS OC2 is a graphics card with some serious-firepower. The card is aimed to interest gamers who are willingly to pay for high performance, but are perhaps not wanting to shell out the top dollar for the pricey pinnacle of GPU technology right now, the 8800 GTX. Being an overclocked 8800 GTS card with 640 MBs of memory, this BFG offering could be seen as addressing a midway point between the attractive price of a 320 MB-variant 8800 GTS, compared to the expensive performance of a 8800 GTX.

You're probably aware of this old gaming adage: the better looking games get, the larger textures grow. To house all those complex textures, you're going to need ever-increasing amounts of VRAM. Bigger is always better – but where is the point of diminishing returns? Is 256 MB going to satisfy you? How about 512 MB's? What 640 MB do for you that 320 MB can't? This is going to be one of the questions we will look in this review of the BFG 8800 GTS OC2 640 MB.