Neoseeker has published a review of the BFG 8800 GTS OC2 graphics card. This 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.

It only takes a moment's glance at any of the benchmarks to gauge how much more power a 8800 GTS class card delivers over our mid-range representatives, the XFX 8600 GT and ASUS EN8600 GTS. Simply put, these cards get blown out of the water. But what 8800 GTS card to go for? Well, this largely depends on your budget, and what resolution you plan to game at. Price-wise, you are looking at paying about a $100 dollar premium for a 8800 GTS 640 MB card, over a 8800 GTS 320 MB card. At the outset of this review, I expected that the performance advantage of the extra 320 MB of memory of the BFG 8800 GTS OC2 would be most noticeable at gaming resolutions above 1600x1200. But all of the benchmarks showed that this was not the case. While the OC2 card maintained a regular performance advantage of between 5 and 12 frames-per-second over the other cards, surprisingly, this was across all resolutions, not just the very high ones. Unfortunately, this negates one of the primary selling points of 640 MB's: you'd expect with this amount of memory, there'd be significant high-res performance gains of the 320 MB variant BFG, but this was not the case.

While the 8800 GTS cards have been out since November of 2006, (nearly a year now), until recently, there has not been very strong competition at this price point. However, with falling HD2900 XT prices, and rumors of a Radeon HD2900 Pro coming sooner then you might think, the landscape between $300 and $450 is slowly changing. Other recent murmurs online also suggest that the first crop of PCI-E version 2 cards will be available in October (although nothing official has been confirmed at this point). But with these impeding revisions of GPUs looming, if you can hold off just a few months, I'd expect $400 will get you much further than it can now.

But what if your planning to buy a card this weekend? Well, in the end, I'd be happy to game with a BFG 8800 GTS OC2 in my case. You get a lot of power -- everything looks awesome at 1600x1200 with eye candy cranked -- and you can expect 640 MB of GDDR3 to serve you well into the future, when more texture-hungry games are released in 2008. To the BFG 8800 GTS OC2's benefit, it is possible that the current crop of games just aren't optimized to use more than 320 MB of VRAM -- and down the road, the extra 320 MB may be very handy indeed. But for now, many of you out there -- especially if you don't have a high-res monitor -- would probably be better served by saving the extra cash, and looking at a 8800 GTS card with 320 MB; such as a BFG 8800 GTS OC.