Thoughts, HEXUS.awards and HEXUS.right2reply
Taking into account cooler choice, price, availability, warranty, bundle and performance, we can honestly conclude that while BFG Tech's OC™ 7900 GT, 7900 GTX and 7600 GT products are decent in isolation, they don't do enough to entice a purchase versus competing products.BFG Tech don't do as much with the clocks as other vendors, and the bundle on all but the 7900 GTX doesn't go the extra mile needed for products in the markets they occupy. Their warranty is very strong, however, which should really factor in to any purchasing decision, but that's not to say it's unique in the company that BFG's products keep. You can find similar warranty terms from some of their competitors these days, as everyone steps up their support game.
The cooler on the 7900 GT and 7600 GT is one of the poorest we've seen in recent times, too, not helping BFG Tech's cause when trying to appeal to potential customers.
In short, our analysis shows that while performance is adequate, it's deficient compared to others (going just on stated clocks) for similar money, all other things being equal.
Not enough to recommend, although if you're buying a the very high end and are happy with G71's image quality, BFG Tech's 7900 GTX is worth consideration if you can find it at a better price than normal, via a special deal or similar.
BFG do too little to put these products at the top of shopping lists, we feel, given the latitude that's available to NVIDIA AIB partners when creating retail SKUs. Simply put, you can find better 7900 GTX, 7900 GT and 7600 GT elsewhere.
HEXUS Awards
BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC™
BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GT OC™
BFG Tech GeForce 7600 GT OC™
BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GT OC™
BFG Tech GeForce 7600 GT OC™
HEXUS Right2Reply
Graham Brown, from BFG's marketing department, was kind enough to offer his thoughts on our review.Dear HEXUS.net,
First of all, thank you for allowing BFG to reach your audience by giving us the opportunity to get our products reviewed by your experienced review staff. At BFG we also appreciate the fact that your review site gives manufacturers the ability to respond to a review publicly, not all websites give this option and should follow in your footsteps to do so.
We would, however, like to address a few key statements in the review made by HEXUS.net to express our opinion:
To start, Hexus.net states in the “Thoughts, Hexus.awards and HEXUS Right2Reply” page that BFG’s clock speed offering is “deficient compared to others for similar money” on the 7900 series. BFG Tech performs extensive testing on its overclocked products before making a final decision as to what clock speed to set the product at for mass-market production. Key decision factors in our analysis include long-term reliability, stability and performance ratings. We feel that such extreme overclocking levels seen in the marketplace today by some competitors are short-sited approaches to making a product faster that could have significantly higher probability of failures over time, and as a result, disappointing customers that have laid out serious cash for a product. This leads us to our next response to your article about warranty and service.
We at BFG are proud of our service history and standards and we are always looking for ways to improve our level of customer satisfaction. We welcome feedback from the community to make sure we become the best in the graphics card industry for servicing the products in our competitive space. We caution your readers about buying into lifetime warranties from manufacturers without researching each specific company’s history of service and what they’ve offered and given in the past. Some competitors offer lifetime warranty only on their high-end or latest product offerings series versus BFG’s complete line-up, while others make the lifetime warranty statement that goes beyond our own, but fail at the end of the day to take care of the customers or not honouring the warranty when an RMA is submitted. We have good competitors as well that do take care of their issues, and we applaud them for stepping up for the healthiness of the industry.
At the end of the day, we hope your customers make their decision to-buy based upon the graphics cards ability to satisfy their PC needs, prior brand experiences, word of mouth and research – and we hope that decision to be BFG. If it’s not BFG, we’d like to learn why as well, in hopes of changing that decision in the future.
Thank you for the opportunity to respond, please don’t hesitate to contact BFG with questions, concerns or feedback.
