BFG GeForce 7800 GTX OC bundle
BFG's GeForce 7800 GTX OC arrives in a box that's more akin to a deluxe motherboard's. Shelling out around £400 should buy you more than reference card, right? BFG makes explicit mention of the card's overclocked nature, leaving you in no doubt that you're buying into a real performance product.
The back of the retail box highlights how the 7800 GTX is up to 41x faster than integrated graphics. It should be; it costs around 41x the price!
Breaking into the bundle shows the following:
Far Cry, the truly excellent but now budget game from Ubisoft, is contained on 5CDs. We wonder why a single DVD wasn't included. Perhaps this is BFG's method of boosting the apparent size of the bundle by weighing you down with a number of CDs. Complementing the card's video-capturing ability is ULEAD's VideoStudio 7SE DVD Edition. The standalone version is now up to iteration 9. Version 7, however, still contains the majority of features, including easy-to-use wizards that take the hard work out of compiling and editing your own clips.
The main driver CD contains NVIDIA's ForceWare 77.50 driver set, a copy of Windows Blinds, a few technology demos dating back to when the GeForce FX5900 and 6800 Ultra were launched. There's also an NVIDIA-branded DVD software player, DirectX 9.0c, and a couple of manuals in acrobat format. What's conspicuously missing is an overclocking utility to take the BFG 7800 GTX card further than its already-enhanced core and memory speeds. A second CD is referred to as the Gamers' Toolkit, which includes a full version of Far Stone's GameDrive 9, a program that creates a virtual hard drive on your PC and run applications from it. Further, it runs games without the need for inserting the original disc into an optical drive. It's done by creating a virtual disc on the PC, and then loading up the game from that. Game compatibility is always going to be an issue, although Far Stone maintains an impressive list of supported games. There's also 30-day trials of Webroot's Windows Washer, Spy Sweeper, and Desktop Firewall applications, as well as another 30-day trial of Iolo's System Mechanic Pro 5.
BFG emblazones its lifetime warranty and 24/7 technical support on the box cover. However, on closer inspection, the lifetime warranty is only afforded to the original purchaser of the card. Selling it on, therefore, makes this warranty invalid. BFG also maintains freephone technical support on a 24/7 basis. That's fantastic for our American cousins over the pond, but U.K. customers first need to dial into the U.S.
Hardware-wise, there's the ubiquitous DVI dongles, a molex extender that's not frightfully useful as the card requires a 6-pin PCIe connector. BFG also bundles in an extra-large T-Shirt, we thought you would like to know.
The range of accompanying cabling is good. What you see above is a set of composite input/output cables as well as a matching set of S-Video sockets.
BFG also includes an HDTV adapter for connecting the 7800 GTX OC up to external displays that make handle High-Definition resolutions.
