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SLI

The 8800 GT has tremendous potential to become the card to engage in SLI.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First off, the 8800 GT has the right size: it is thin -- with a single-slot cooler.  This means that even with SLI cards you won't be crowding out the last few slots in the motherboard.

The card also has the right price-performance ratio (I know we haven't got to the benchmarks yet, but just trust me for now.) And finally, this new GPU also has low power requirements (so there is no need to to purchase an expensive PSU; or worry too much about excess heat).

We tested SLI, running the BFG 8800 GT OC in tandem with a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT, and had some very encouraging results in about half of our benchmarks. I'm sure, given a bit more time, SLI will be up and running smoothly with all our titles tested, but for now, it was hit or miss.  NVIDIA takes SLI very seriously and seems to work hard and fast at bringing SLI support to as many titles as possible as quickly as possible.

So, if you see SLI numbers in the graphs, that means SLI worked in the game. No SLI numbers means SLI either did not work, or offered no performance advantage.

Bundle

The BFG 8800 GT OC doesn't offer any surprises in its accompanying bundle. It consists of a well-written quick installation guide, a driver CD, a double-molex to PCIE power connector, a display port adaptor, and a DVI/VGA dongle.

What you see is what you get.

Overclocking

Time was a huge constraint for this article, so unfortunately, we did not have much oppourtinity to delve deeper into the overclocking side of things with the BFG 8800 GT OC. But we did manage to get some numbers for you, and they are impressive.

The card was quite stable at 692 (core clock) / 960 (memory clock). Our stability test was forty-five minutes of alternating World In Conflict and Call of Juarez benchmarks.

With this kind of headroom, BFG could have maybe pushed their OC up a little notch. But I presume they are holding off for a BFG 8800 GT OC2 -- and there's nothing wrong with that.

Anyways: the BFG 8800 GT OC has great overclocking potential. And we will explore this potential further in future articles.