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BFG Exiting Graphics Card Market
thsoundman writes news that BFG appears to be giving up on the graphics card side of its business. The company's chairman said in a statement:
"After eight years of providing innovative, high-quality graphics cards to the market, we regret to say that this category is no longer profitable for us, although we will continue to evaluate it going forward. We will continue to provide our award-winning power supplies and gaming systems, and are working on a few new products as well. I'd like to stress that we will continue to provide RMA support for our current graphics card warranty holders, as well as for all of our other products such as power supplies, PCs, and notebooks."
BFG was one of many manufactures that made nVidia cards from their reference design. Often, they would improve on the design with a better HSF and higher quality RAM so the card could be overclocked out of the box.
Kinda sad to see them go. They've always provided good warranty support.
Life is not for the lazy.
The difference is the warranty still applies if it breaks. they are *guaranteed* to work at those speeds, often because of a beefier / better cooling and better ram as a previous poster said. I'm using one in one of my machines, and it still works, which can't be said for one of my Sapphires (running at stock speeds).
Any other card *might* be able to run at higher speeds, *might* being the magic word.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
And in those 5 minutes you could completely void your warranty on your $350 video card, or spend the extra $20 and keep it.
Since overclocking control (and sometimes even overvolting) is now built into the software drivers/control panel (with approved limits), you don't void your warranty by doing these sort of small overclocks.
If you re-program your BIOS or disable the overclock limit by using a third-party program, you might void your warranty. Since the chips have thermal shutdown built in, you really can't harm them by overclocking, so even some of that may be OK. Intel is an another example of a company that realized this and now offers overclocking of the CPU on Intel-brand motherboards.