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Based on the 7800 GS GPU, this is the most powerful card in this group test.The chip itself is the same as used in the PCI Express 7800 GT/GTX cards, but somewhat crippled. There are six vertex shaders, 16 pixel pipelines and 16 pixel output engines. In comparison, the 7800 GT has 20 pixel pipelines and the seven vertex shaders, while the 7800 GTX has 24 pixel pipelines and eight vertex shaders.

In order to get the chip to work, nVidia uses a bridge chip, which converts the native PCI Express signals into an AGP form. This has proven to be particularly good, with graphics cards such as the 6600 AGP using it with little or no performance impact. The same technology is used on the 7600 GS and GT cards tested here.

A reference 7800 GS runs with a 375MHz core and 600Mhz (1,200MHz effective) memory. This particular card runs a 400MHz core and 625MHz (1,250MHz effective) memory. That's not a significant improvement for an “overclocked” card, but it's better than nothing and BFG don't tend to charge much of a premium for this extra speed. This is of course covered under warranty, and most specifically for life. BFG also offers 24/7 support, so if you have any problems you should be able to get them sorted pretty easily.

There isn't a bundle to speak of with this card, other than a D-SUB to DVI converter. There is one DVI connector, and one D-SUB connector, so you shouldn't need this unless you run dual analogue displays. There is an S-Video output too, should you want to connect to your TV.

As the AGP slot can't supply as much power as the PCI Express slot, you need to plug in a Molex connector to get this work properly. The cooler is fairly chunky copper affair, and the fan is quite quiet.

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