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Long and sleek could possibly be your first impression of the BFG 8800 GT OC, upon seeing it for the first time.

Far thinner than its elder brothers the 8800 GTX and 8800 GTS, the 8800 GT has a single-slot cooler.  It does have the length of it's older brothers though: the BFG 8800 GT OC would probably almost reach from one end of your mainboard to the other. The heatsink/fan cooling solution is somewhat reminsicent of some I've seen on GeForce 7800 series cards -- but unlike the cards from that class, the cooler stretches across almost the entire length of the card. There is one problem with this cooling though: it seems that an awful lot of heat is pushed out towards the rear of the card. After some extended use, you can expect the BFG 8800 GT OC's DVI ports to become hot to the touch. This probably does not bode well for air circulation in your case -- it'd probably be beneficial to arrange any internal fans with this in mind.

The card may be thin, but under the hood we have around 748 million transitors of gaming power. The 8800 GT has a core clock set to 600 MHz, a memory clock of 900 MHz, and a shader clock of 1500 MHz.

BFG Tech being BFG Tech, they've overclocked this card. The overclock is slight though: 625 for the core, 1566 for the shader clock, and the memory hasn't been overclocked at all.

As for the other vital numbers, the BFG 8800 GT OC has 512 MB of GDDR3, and retails for around $259 CDN / USD. 8800 GT's will also come in 256 MB versions, and they will retail for about $50 clams (CDN or US clams) less.

The 8800 GT does not have any universe-shattering new architeural features. Basically, the folks at Nvidia just took all they learnt from the 8800 GTX / GTS series of cards, and applied this knowledge into the construction of the 8800 GT. The 8800 GT is like a 8800 GTX Light -- the GT uses less power (requires only one PCI-E power connector, and should run fine on a 400 W PSU) and has 112 stream processors (compared to 128 SP's in a 8800 GTX.)

The 8800 GT gives a lot, without being greedy.

And one thing I am very happy to report to you is that the BFG 8800 GT OC has a 256-bit memory interface. Hopefully, this will help those other so called 'upper mid-range' cards sporting 128-bit memory interfaces completely going out style of favor in 2008.

The card is about 9 inches long.

BFG towers of power.

In addition to the BFG 8800 GT's gaming prowess, the 8800 GT also has the other features of shared by the 8800 series cards. The first is a new and improved VP2 variety of PureVideo, which allows your video card to handle HD DVD and Blu-Ray decoding via the GPU, so that your CPU is less burdened.

The 8800 GT also has the ability to explore the world of CUDA and Tesla. If you are not familiar with these two things, in a very big hazy nutshell, Tesla allows for the parellel-processing power of your GPU to be utilized in software applications. For example: some Folding at Home projects are optimized to use Tesla. The parellel nature of GPU design allows for some tasks and calculations to run many, many times faster on your GPU than could be run on a multi-core CPU.

The 8800 GT video cards are also the first to support the new PCIe version 2.0 standard  - although, this won't have much affect on performance. That extra bandwidth offered by PCIe won't be taken advantage of anytime soon. This card also features Shader Model 4.0 support.

One more good thing about this particular card is BFG Tech's Lifetime warranty. The kind folks at BFG assure you that if you don't swap coolers, or overclock your card excessively, they will replace your BFG 8800 GT OC in the off-chance that something goes kaput.