Right, since you've just learned all about the reference 8600 GTS, let's have a peek at what BFG has to offer. It's not a bad piece of hardware as we'll show you. BFG is dealing with a lot of competition these days and since all competitors offer faster pre-clocked versions they introduced their OC product. You simply take a reference based card, clock it 15 MHz faster and call it overclocked. Recently however their quality analysis process has been improved somewhat they are now making a rigid selection of cards and the top of the cream batch card can be clocked even higher and this get that OC2 label slapped on them.

The OC2 version runs at:

• 720 MHz graphics core frequency (675 for the standard product)
• 2220 MHz memory frequency (2000 for the standard product)
• 1566 MHz shader domain clock (1450 for the standard product)

Let's have a peek at the 8600 GTS line clock frequencies:

• BFG 8600 GTS (replaced by OC version)
• BFG 8600 GTS OC - 710 MHz Core / 2000 M MHz memory
• BFG 8600 GTS OC Thermo Intelligence - 710 MHz Core / 2000 MHz memory
• BFG 8600 GTS OC2 Thermo Intelligence - 720 MHz Core / 2220 MHz memory

Yep .. we have something new to explain Thermo Intelligence.

"Introducing the first new Air cooled product as part of our ThermoIntelligence series is the BFG NVIDIA® GeForce® 8600 GTS OC™ & OC2™ 256MB PCIe graphics cards. These cards feature a brand new exclusive cooling solution with exceptional thermal performance that doesn’t take up an additional add-in card slot or generate excess acoustic noise.

Usually when I read this stuff I tend to get a little skeptical. And yes I am wondering right now. Anyway, BFG slapped on a new "Thermo Intelligence" fansink which according to BFG was designed from the ground up by BFG to provide better cooling performance without any gimmicks or draw backs.

Some basic distinction that went into the design consisted of moving the fan to the opposite end of the heatsink to eliminate a dead air zone and increasing the surface area over the GPU for better heat dissipation.

Granted the new cooler works slightly better, but just a little though. However, we did achieve a very nice additional overclock and even more importantly this little cooling daemon is silent ! We'll show you all that in the review and tests though.

Included in the box you'll find:

• GeForce 8600 GTS 256 MB with TI cooler
• Driver CD
• HDTV block (3-way RCA component)
• 6-pin to Molex power cable
• manual / quick install guide
• VGA->DVI dongle (two)

That's it, no additional software. You receive the hardware and that's all. What did catch my eye is pretty darn cool though. BFG is offering you a Lifetime Warranty if you reside in the USA and 10 years in Europe (EU legislation) with this graphics card. And at this price-level that's a mighty nice investment.

Anyway, let's run a couple of tests and have a peek at temperatures, power consumption and noise levels before we head on over to the extensive benchmark session shall we ?

The board, the bundle.