NVIDIA’s 6600GT is still the sweet spot for budget buyers that are looking for nice performance at an affordable price tag. That said, NVIDIA’s 6600GT positioning could change with ATI’s X800GT, as it proposes to be fiercer than its X700 series of graphics adapters. The X700 was really a competitor to the regular 6600 with better performance and an aggressive price tag, but it ATI was clearly marketing it otherwise to better deal with the situation.

We believe ATI is too late with the launch of its X800GT (whenever it decides to launch it), since the market has already declared the 6600GT the best choice for budget buyers with a matching price and rock solid performance. With next generation of GPUs coming out rapidly, maybe ATI is better off working on a competitive midrange GPU for the GeForce 7 series to better get ready for the competition ahead. Then again, maybe ATI feels the midrange market to be pretty strong for the 6600GT and don’t want it to succeed without fair opposition. Regardless of what ATI feels, NVIDIA’s 6600GT is still the top choice in the midrange market. The longer ATI delays its X800GT, the tougher it’ll be for them to oppose NVIDIA.

BFGTech has made it a standard to factory overclock its cards with a special "OC" right next to product titles. Even though we are not too keen on factory-overclocked cards with a higher price tag, we certainly appreciate the customer service and warranty that’s included with BFGTech graphics adapters. From our experience, BFGTech has always been reliable and the customer service is very impressive. That said, let’s move on to BFGTech’s 6600GT OC that is overclocked to 525MHz core and 1050MHz memory from 500MHz and 1000MHz default. This depicts an overclock of five percent, respectively. It’s nothing significant, but good enough to give BFGTech an edge over its competition.

Other than that, the BFGTech 6600GT OC has 128MB of DDR3 memory, 16.8GB/s of total memory bandwidth in addition to a fairly decent heatsink with RAMsinks and a higher price tag than we are used to. Does the BFGTech 6600GT OC have what it takes to be a competitor? We sure hope so, but let’s get to the board layout and benchmarks before we present you with our final thoughts...

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