Pre OCed Vid Cards?

[WintersFury]

I had a friend ask me about if it's worth the money to get a pre OCed video card.

So I figured I'd see what all of you guys think. To me it seemed that some had too much of a price premium over the stock cards however some seemed to be a decent value. $30 for an extra 100MHz on the core.

But lets say I was going to help him OC the card in software, would that $30 get me a card that should OC better or just one with less headroom left for OCing?


Thanks for any opins on the matter!

 

[Ripskin]

It can depend on the card and the OC your getting. Some cards can be worth it others perhaps not.

I went with a BFG OC'd card and have not regretted it or my last two purchased from them. I dont have a lot of free time to mess around with OC'ing the vid cards anymore. My 6800 gt oc crapped out about a year ago and I got a nice 7800 as an RMA replacement 4 years after I bought it. If they warranty the product OC'd then it can be very worth it. Other factors like price etc of course.

 

[WintersFury]

Thanks Rip.

That's some pretty good service from BFG. I was going to suggest the eVGA cards to him, as their OCed cards are pretty reasonably priced and I've heard good things about the customer service, but never anything like what BFG did for you.

Reminds me of OCZ, I sent back a 1gb DDR-400 memory kit like 2 years after I bought it cause it never worked right (one stick was bad) and I never wound up using it. They sent me back a 2gb kit in no time at all. And it took them no time to respond to emails or anything.

Needless to say I only buy OCZ memory.

Perhaps I'll have to steer him twards BFG instead of eVGA even with the lower factory OC. Not like he's playing crysis and needs every fps he can get cause of the game killing the computer.

 

[Dozoy]

They can definitely be worth it. The pre oc'd cards have cherry picked cores and memory modules. Many non oc'd cards will produce artifacts at the speed of the pre oc'd card. But is the performance gain worth it to you?